Speaker by Various Artists

“So tell me, someone that's known him your whole life, who was Barnaby Jack?”

It's a question I've been asked countless times by countless reporters over the past few months. It should be the easiest of all questions I've been asked about my brother, but it's the one I find the toughest to answer.

Every time, though, that someone's asked it, I find myself thinking of a chat we had about a year ago about work, relationships and life in general.

“Honestly, I'm okay at stuff,” he wrote about his job.

“I just picked a field and got in early.”

That's who my brother was.

He was one of the smartest people I've ever met. A genius. He was a pioneer in the computer security field. He was a rock star with “fans” in every corner of the world. He spent his days saving potential lives.

But none of that ever changed him. He was successful while remaining as humble as they came. He'd be stoked to see how much his work meant to so many people. But he'd also be embarrassed by the media frenzy that hit when he passed away.

He was, “okay at stuff”.

“By the way,” he'd asked later, as we discussed a presentation he'd be preparing for, “You know how you can make food colouring not drop to the bottom of a glass of water?”

It was just over two months ago that my mother lost her son. That I lost my brother and that the world lost a genius. A genius who spent his days literally saving potential lives, without ever having studied medicine, and most every day people never knew what he was up to.

The computer world, however, mourned the loss of Barnaby Jack publicly, to a point that I lost count of how many tweets, messages and emails I received from people I had never heard of, telling me how much they admired my brother.

I'll never forget the moment I found out, and the physical pain of being told that Barnes was gone. He's always been invincible to me. Somebody so brilliant yet so genuine would be around forever. It would be too cruel for him not to be.

I always knew he was brilliant. And I always knew that what he did was big. But I never completely understood how brilliant. Or how big. That was until he died and that fact was the number one most read story on BBC the next day as well as countless other news websites, radio and TV.

He was meant to be in the news the weeks after he died. He was due to talk at a  hacking conference in Vegas about pacemakers and their vulnerability to hacking. It was a huge deal. People were anticipating it. Especially after his earlier exploits with ATM machines and insulin pumps. We knew it and so did he. I'd spoken to him numerous times about his talk, the preparation he was putting into it, and just how big a story this could be.

He never liked to admit it, though. He was always more proud of me and my comparatively minor achievements.

To him, that was always so much bigger. Because I was his little sister.

To me he was more than a famous hacker. He was more than the life of the party that everyone instantly loved.

He was my brother, and he was my hero.

I always thought my best trait was the fact that I was Barnaby Jack's sister.

I think the reason it's so hard to explain who my brother was is simply because he was so many things. And so much more than the insanely brilliant hacker who could empty an ATM of its contents from a laptop or find security vulnerabilities in medical devices designed to save lives. He was more than the member of the 'elite hacking group' that was hired to hack into cars, even though he never bothered learning how to drive one himself.

Barnaby was my best friend from the moment I was born. My idol and my protector who achieved so much but always made it clear that the moments he really felt happy were the days he knew his family was doing well.

Barnaby was a guy who traveled the world, making friends and fans everywhere he went and was literally changing the medical world while he was at it, but he never lost touch with his family and friends back home. He lived on the other side of the planet, but we'd email most days, often multiple times a day, chatting for hours on end.

Barnaby was the guy who didn't think twice about putting his career on hold to stay in New Zealand and be here while our father was dying years ago.

He was the guy who didn't hesitate to take on the role of Dad as well as protective older brother when I needed him to.

He was the guy who would treat total strangers like old friends, because he would simply assume that at some point in the future that's exactly what they'd be.

That's why he made such an impact in so many corners of the world. He was the guy you'd spend one night interacting with and would never forget. He had an absolute love of life and fun, and that love was infectious.

Barnes was the kind of guy who loved to be around people. As long as they were genuine. He had no time for posers or false sincerities.

I miss that.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked when the fascination for computers emerged -- and while he was pretty young, I honestly can't remember. He'd always been fascinated, however, by how things work and the idea that with a bit of tinkering, things may be able to work that little bit better.

I remember experiments with chemistry sets and Lego. I remember allowing him to remove the heads and limbs of various Barbie dolls then having to invent various injuries to account for the fact they never made it back to me in one piece. I remember trying to imitate his skill with building intricate model planes and boats, only to find I didn't have either the skill or patience to make them work.

I remember, as kids, sitting up with him long after we were supposed to be asleep, listening to his plans for various adventures or games that we could invent and play.

I remember being told all about birthday presents he'd bought me that he didn't want to wait to surprise me with, or convincing me to unwrap all my Christmas presents when he did the same to his, one Christmas Eve, or sitting up all night with him so that he could prove to me that Santa was, in fact, a made-up character. I remember knowing at the time, as well, that none of these things were done out of cruelty, but simply because he wanted me as his sidekick for all of the above, because nothing's ever as much fun or exciting without someone by your side to share it with.

I idolised him from day one. And I was lucky in that I never felt like I was tagging along. He always dragged me along for adventures with his mates – and I always happy followed. To me he could do no wrong and the second he started making waves with computers I knew he was destined for big things. Maybe all sisters say that. Maybe it's our job to believe such things. I don't know.

Barnes was never short of crowds of people around because he had a real talent for lighting up a room when he entered. I have photos of him as a kid, surrounded by girls obviously hanging on his every word. It was the same as he got older. Barnes would walk in a room and people would follow him. Because the day or night would be more entertaining, more exciting, just more fun, if Barnes was there.

 I miss that.

The day after he died a friend suggested to me that I literally write down every piece of advice that Barnaby gave me that I could remember. That at some stage it would all come in handy. It would be like he's almost there, giving me advice again. I've been doing it and it's true, I'm glad I now have a notebook of tidbits of awesome to scroll through when I need it.

He had a knack for giving advice without ever making it sound like that's what he was doing.

“In my opinion,” he told me once during one of our online chat marathons, “having integrity in what you do, and the respect from those that YOU respect – that's when you can say you've 'made it'.”

And going by that advice, it's pretty safe to say my brother “made it”. Not just in work, but in life as a whole.

And I couldn't be more proud.

Which is basically a long-winded way of finding an answer to the question I mentioned earlier.

Who was Barnaby Jack?

Barnaby Jack was my big brother.

And I'll be forever grateful for that.

There's something that's been annoying me every time I hear about it this week, and it's got nothing to do with boats.

It's the countless people, friends and general social networking contacts, who are taking part in, promoting or simply talking about the 'Live Below the Line' challenge.

I get the idea behind it, and don't get me wrong, it's a good one. It's the execution that has me wondering why on earth we seem to think it's a healthy, good idea to encourage and praise young people for depriving themselves of decent, well balanced meals yet turn around and cry bloody murder every time a skinny model shows up in a magazine somewhere.

Having dealt with food and body image issues in the past I'm not naïve enough to believe that a week of eating on a little over $2.00 per day is enough to result in an influx of anorexia patients lining up at the local hospital, but I'm also not naïve enough to believe that these kinds of fundraisers that encourage and praise people's efforts when it comes to restrictive eating and excessive self-control doesn't have any dangerous consequences for those that are already wired as susseptible to eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

I clearly recall the end of 40 hour famines growing up. Numbers and figures were bandied about after the two day challenge, but they certainly weren't dollars raised. Weight loss was the goal of the girls at my school and I am pretty sure that there were very few of them gave a sweet damn about the poor, hungry kids they were supposed to be helping.

It's hard to explain to those that have never struggled with food, diet and body image in any severe manner, but I've had the opportunity over the years to talk freely and openly with a number of people that do, in the most heartbreaking and life-threatening ways.

One that springs to mind was in her 40s, and still suffering from anorexia to the point where she couldn't bring herself to eat a couple of tablespoons of muesli and not making herself sick.

We sat and talked on a few occasions and everytime we did I couldn't help but stare and the bones protruding from her extremely diminutive figure and the thick, dark circles under her eyes, making them seem about twice the size that they actually were. Her heart had stopped on a few ocassions and was liekly to continue to do so until one day it wouldn't start again. I asked her once if she was scared of dying. Sure, she told me. But not as scared as I am of eating.

She was a wonderful human. And the only reason I've never tried to get back in touch with her is because I'm pretty sure she won't still be alive. And it's easier to imagine she is.

It's a side of the disease that most people don't see. And it's a side I wish I never had.

We spoke about the 40 Hour Famine once and she recalled it well. She'd done it as often as she could get away with. People would praise her when she lost a bit of weight over the couple of days and tell her how good she looked. And she could literally starve herself and not only would people not question it, but they'd actually praise her self control.

And the frightening thing is there are countless people like her, or people that could one day be like her.

I clearly remember the feeling after losing a little weight after a 40 Hour Famine. The praise over self-control, the encouragement over looking great because of it. It's easy motivation to keep going. It's a frighteningly easy trap to lose yourself in.

Which is why I never understood why we find it necessary to encourage people to restrict their diet, to starve themselves or to prohibit themselves from eating full, balanced, healthy meals, for the sake of what? The act of not eating doesn't save children. Raising money does.

I'm pretty sure kids living in extreme poverty go without other things as well. Pretty much everything we enjoy every day and could easily go without for a week without it kicking off a potentially life-threatening habit.

TVs, cellphones, internet, fancy cars, trim lattes, electric blankets, whatever.

Why does it have to be the one thing that thousands of people obsess over anyway?

I'd love to know how many people taking part in Live Below the Line are truly doing it for its actual purpose, and how many are using it as a way of forcing themselves to have extreme self-control, to eat less without guilt or questions and to ultimately lose “just a little bit of weight”.

I get that a lot of the food that people are eating on this challenge – the cheap stuff like rice and pasta – aren't the most diet friendly of foods, but to praise people for going hungry, for only eating a few basics and for not “cheating” by eating a decent meal when the body cries out for it seems completely insane.

You know what the South American kids would say if we asked them to do the same thing?

They'd look at us like we're crazy.

Because lets face it. We kind of are.

When I first started as a tech reporter at Computerworld back in 1997 I remember one Russell Brown gleefully proposing a cover story that consisted mainly of quotes from then Minister of Communications Maurice Williamson threatening to take action over an issue if everyone didn’t simmer down a bit.

From memory, each quote would be accompanied by a picture of Maurice “with beard, without beard, with beard” and so on.

I’m not sure if it ran, but it certainly made an impression on me as a new reporter. Clearly whatever the issue was it had been going on a long time even then, and there was no sign of any resolution in sight.

The problem was Telecom and anyone over the age of 18 will remember the good/bad old days before we had a regulator.

What you can’t see is the nearly 600 words of history I’ve just deleted as being too tedious and too awful to repeat. Can I take it as read you all remember the transformation of the Post Office network arm into a rapacious company that paid out more in dividends to its American owners than would have been legal in America?

Today, that network is run by a company called Chorus. In 2010, Telecom split into two separate companies in order to compete for the giant pot of gold that is the “Ultra Fast Broadband” network that will deliver a fibre network to 75% of New Zealand homes and businesses.

Chorus is building about two thirds of the UFB and in exchange we’re giving Chorus an interest-free loan of nearly $1bn that doesn’t need to be repaid for quite some time.

But Chorus still owns the copper broadband network, and that's where the trouble starts.

I’ll apologise now for getting geeky in the next bit. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

As a monopoly, it’s fully regulated by the Telecommunications Commissioner, introduced in 2001 as a result of all the nonsense that went on in the 1990s under Maurice.

In the old days, the price of broadband was decided by the Commissioner on a “retail minus” model. That is, you worked out the average price for all the retail services, took off a margin and bingo! you had your wholesale price.

These days Chorus doesn’t have any retail services. It doesn’t sell to you and me, it sells to Vodafone and Telecom, Orcon and CallPlus and the like and they sell to us.

So the new Telco Act (introduced by Steven Joyce to make all this happen) says the Commissioner must move away from retail minus to “cost plus” which, just as the name suggests, involves finding the cost of service, adding a small margin and calling that your wholesale price.

Everyone knew this would result in a massive drop in the wholesale price of broadband. Retail providers were licking their chops at the thought. Internet users would get more bang for their buck which would be nice because New Zealand data caps are among the most ridiculous in the OECD.

In its draft decision, the Commission suggested a drop from $20 or so per line to about $8 or so per line.

Chorus cried foul. This would take $160m a year off its revenue, it said although we’ve not seen any proof to back that up.

The Minister of Communications, Amy Adams, launched a review of the Telecommunications Act. A discussion document has been released and in it are three options for dealing with this problem: The minister will pick the price; the minister will pick the price using a slightly different model or; the minister will tell the Commerce Commission what the price should be.

The outcome of these three options is exact the same – you will end up paying more for your broadband than you should. The price of your broadband is now being decided by Cabinet.

The government is taxing us $600m and giving it to a company that reported a $171m profit last year.

We think the Commerce Commission should be allowed to work out what the cost of service is in accordance with the law as it stands.

Chorus signed the contract - it should get on and do the job it has been paid to do.

We think the backroom renegotiation of the contract should be axed because it destabilises the entire industry and we think that you, the customers, should get the savings you were promised by Steven Joyce back in 2010.

The government needs to hear from you. Submissions on its draft discussion document are due in tomorrow – Friday the 13th – and you can email in your thoughts to . Better yet, let Amy Adams know what you think directly at .

---

Paul Brislen is the CEO of TUANZ and is @paulbrislen on Twitter

A broad-based "axe the tax" lobby group, the Coalition for Fair Internet Pricing, will launch at 12.30pm today in Wellington.

What  if your local body representatives are not really from your 'hood?  They may not be. I suggest that you take a hard look now at your  local-body election candidates and where they live. I did, and I'm appalled at what I found.

On www.vote.co.nz type in your address and you'll  find out who is standing for what and, for the first time, whether they live in the ward in which they are a candidate.

Of the beauties seeking my vote in the Christchurch Ciy Council's Spreydon-Heathcote ward, I was stunned to find these tallies. For the honour of being my Councillor, four out of eight candidates prodded with the compliance stick had to confess that, shucks, I don't live in the ward. Half of them. Two seats are available,

For the important-to-locals Community Board, there are nine contenders for the five voter-appointed positions.  Seven candidates do not live here,  leaving just two locals.

Meaning that, at best, two representatives  will live  in the ward.

Potentially no Spreydon-Heathcote Councillors or Community Board members will live in the ward. The majority of candidates wanting to represent me at local body level don't live in my area. Stunning.

In normal times, carpetbagging on this scale could just be shrugged off as job creation for the bossy classes, but in (hopefully) post-earthquake Christchurch, we do have a few pressing issues to address.

The Christchurch City Council was so lacking that the Government had no choice but to beget new systems for dealing with the problems of disaster and its aftermath.

CERA is in part the bastard child of the inept management of the city after September 2010's 7.1 earthquake. Active democracy got kicked to one side by central Government on one hand, on the other by  the city council's corporate-style managerialism.

After years of bricks in handbags being swung, ECAN had its elected heads severed and commissioners were put in place to impose some dubious order that, while effective on some levels, has also severely constrained democracy on others. Not the least of which is that  residents have not been able to vote for their Regional Council for years.

During the worst of the Canterbury earthquake cycle, Christchurch's infrastructure, especially below ground, came perilously close to system failure.  Basic functions like water reticulation and wastewater disposal hovered on the edge of collapse.

Close on 80 per cent of the central city building stock has been demolished.

So in rebuild city our new statistics are the sort that give old Stalinists an erection. Millions of tonnes of cement pours. Vast kilometerages of new pipe in the ground. Huge, complex infrastructure problems to be fixed. A city fit for double-cab utes, mega-cranes and thundering trucks on a scale not seen since the Ministry of Works built its gigantic hydro dams and Rob Muldoon unleashed Think Big.

The central city gets the focus  because our local newspaper journalists work there and the ruling classes love centres of power, even semi-vacant ones. “Nice” areas like my St Martins, which was right by the epicentre of the devastating February 22 earthquake, shudder through a stately twinset and pearls comeback from disaster. Not showy or noisy, (bad for property values, dear) but with huge needs despite the lack of headlines. Local churches put together food parcels for old gels who never thought they would be in need of help in their lives.

Throughout the city community groups and not-for-profits staff are buggered from overwork and burn-out. The poor struggle to meet horrific rents, while the middle classes in the firing line of the quakes are giving shrinks new benchmarks for sedation thresholds before they chill. People, me included, get inexplicable viral infections that go on for months as the adrenalin/cortisol combo aftermath hammers already-compromised immune systems while a rainstorm  makes  Elizabethan open sewers of our rivers.

The very real feeling of disempowerment that comes from not being able to literally trust the ground you stand on, never mind government and insurers, means people have a huge hunger to feel they have some say, some small control over their lives.

Our city has never been in greater need of people who know what is happening here.

Nor has the need for informed, incisive and responsive local knowledge at local government level ever been higher. But when I drill down into the candidates's brief biographies I find that they simply ain't from round here. (And they don't say where they do live.)

That's shabby and shameful.

I nearly put up my hand for community board this time, prodded along by one former Mayor until a family crisis got in the way. As a former adviser  to another Christchurch Mayor,  local body reporter and political/economic journalist,  small- business owner and parent,  I have useful expertise to throw in the mix. What held me back? I've only lived in St Martins for a few years, and frankly Christchurch has had its fair share of “media personalities” in local body politics, with very mixed results.

I ain't from round here, being originally a creature of the hardscrabble Eastern suburbs (which to northerners is equivalent to Auckland's Westies). My partner says it has given me an Archie Bunker affinity that makes me highly attuned to the likes and dislikes of lower Middle New Zealand. After a decade rejoicing in the nickname of “the enforcer” in local body affairs, it turns out I was the one with too many dainty scruples. Going by the candidates' details, it looks like a local address is so last century.

Maybe all the carpet-baggers will produce tragic back stories of how quakes and disaster drove them out from the local burrows they and their forebears had infested for years. I don't care, right now they ain't from round here. Maybe they will promise to move into the ward if elected (a flying pig just shot past my window).

As I've said, the need for local knowledge  has never been higher. At Community Board level the vital but banal calls on things like berms, footbridges, and parks are important little parts of everyday reality.

At Council level, where a perfect storm of catastrophe and incompetence has left a huge deficit in capacity and focus,  local advocates are vital.

Instead, more than a casual look shows the Council will be skewed  by carpetbaggers and party hacks parachuted in to impersonate local voices.

At Community Board level we will have a horde of bossy boots who, having ordained what happens round here, then go home to somewhere else.

Step back from the party political divide and just think about that for sheer arrogance.

This is not the case of getting the government we deserve. This is getting government nobody deserves. Especially here in Christchurch where trust in  the “authorities” is already at a very low ebb.

Wherever you are, take the time before you  vote to find out if your new voices will be able to represent your area and your local interests.

 

* Greg Jackson is chair of Tenants' Protection Association and was a spin doctor, loves gardening leave and is always open to exciting offers. 

Whenever the term ‘inside-the-beltway’ is used I usually wince. We Wellingtonians go about our business inside a succession of off-ramps, not inside a beltway. Off-ramp doesn’t sound as fashionable I guess, but then again neither is the view inside the capital about the Prime Minister’s competence in adopting a partisan 61-vote strategy to pass his Government’s Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill. There is quite a bit of head-shaking from wise old hands, who saw the problem from the get go; a bare majority vote would prove a worse result than not passing the law at all.

Some distinguished New Zealanders did try and tell Key this, but they were all dismissed in scattergun attacks on their virtue, assisted gracelessly by his Attorney-General Chris Finlayson during the bill’s Third Reading Debate. God and sin seemed to have caused its own rot there, but never mind, if Peter Dunne wasn’t such a ‘willing seller’ of his vote he could have prevented the bill from passing by such a wafer thin margin. This would have proved his best rationale for not supporting it, especially as common sense has long been his purported lodestar. That future is gone now. 

John Key, seemingly without awareness, has now created the space for uncertainty to form around our future intelligence relationships and foreign policy intentions under a Labour-led Government, which is an intriguing strategic blunder, especially for someone who has worked so hard to maintain the closest of relations with the United States. I doubt our four old friends will view Key’s 61-59 passage as any thing other than a disaster.

In this one aspect, above all others, Prime Minister John Key has codified his ineptitude as the responsible minister. Four of our ‘Five Eyes’ partners will ponder this question: will New Zealand’s gaze shift when there is a change of government?

Key’s strategy has gifted Labour and the Greens greater space in which to contemplate any change of emphasis or direction in the future. The Intelligence bureaucracy will now also have to wonder about what’s in store for them once National does lose, which is a very good thing, but nonetheless surely an unintended consequence for this bill’s author.

Given this bill was about an aspect of national security, and involving a review of legislation fashioned in the aftermath of 9/11, it was indisputably the Prime Minister’s responsibility to reach out to fashion a bi-partisan legislative response, as Labour and National managed back in 2003. It was his bill. Politics got in the way this time, I believe, because John Key wouldn’t give David Shearer a platform like Helen Clark afforded him for their Section 59 compromise.

As well, Key’s form on Kim Dotcom and the GCSB – by no means limited to the Ministerial Certificate Ian Fletcher had Bill English sign to cover up their illegal activity or the by now, from memory, five corrections the Prime Minister has been forced to make in the Hansard about his nemesis Dotcom – meant he didn’t have his usual advantages or leverage, except of course over Peter Dunne.

So a 61-vote strategy won out, but any attempt to lead a principled policy discussion to gain consensus about the difficult trade-offs between preserving precious civil liberties and pursuing genuine threats to our national security, and then how to write good law to draw these boundaries and the state actions that can take place within them, were extinguished once a bare majority became the extent of Key’s legislative ambition.     

It also took some special incompetence by the prime minister to not secure the votes of New Zealand First. Winston and his party are conservative on, and concerned about, national security issues so he was disposed to help in improving the bill. Ultimately, Winston was rebuffed once Dunne’s vote had been willingly bought and sold. There is among the opposition parties genuine anger at many of Key’s cavalier public statements about so-called negotiations or discussions held privately.  

For mine, aside from thinking about how best to resist this law, I continue to believe that it’s a very bad idea to have all the intelligence functions, and their oversight, and the control thereof, all within the executive, without the prudential and countervailing balance of effective oversight being provided by another branch of government. This heightens the potential for abuse, whatever colour jersey a prime minister might wear, whether red or blue.

The Prime Minister’s belated attempts to justify the need for the legislation – which amounted to not much more than one appearance on Campbell Live and a third reading speech – provided a late flourish in what was an otherwise disastrous communication effort. Yelling “Yemen” and “Al-Qaeda” in the theatre, or biffing his critics with individualized care, like that delivered to former Prime Minister and constitutional scholar Geoffrey Palmer, or the low-rent venom delivered against Anne Salmond; well, it says a lot about Key’s attitude to well reasoned and principled criticism.

Back when he was president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson challenged his presidents to be as big a man as they could be. In his Pike River Memorial Speech Key was that man when he spoke with power to the surviving children of the twenty-nine dead miners. I believe over the course of the GCSB debate, however, that John Key has become a smaller man, more petty than we’ve seen him before.

The Prime Minister has been like King Canute; everybody’s wrong but me, everyone’s wrong but me. Or, when under pressure Key will fall back on his latest internal poll number: ‘Forty-nine.’ Spoken like an accountant. Spoken like a tactician and somebody whose 61-59 victory is no real victory at all because it will not prove to be the last word. Key’s poor leadership has guaranteed it. Inside the off-ramp last night a man called John stood naked for all of us to see.