Posts by Adam H
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...not “a good, hard-working honest, New Zealander”
That is one of the most chilling phrases yet. I fear we are heading into a period of Fascism. This is the type of language with which it begins.
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PS. This sounds like a job for Super-ComCom: <further sarcastic comment redacted due to having conceded defeat>
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Angela Hart,
The only benefits of the journals are .... prestige.
I think in a world where simple minded beanies decide funding based on simple minded metrics like 'number of articles published in reputable peer review journals' you may have hit on a critical aspect of the problem.
I tried repeatedly to fund small scale NZ research, and one of the constant barriers was whether they could get the results published in a 'reputable' (i.e. overseas) journal.
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An extreme version of what our future may hold:
http://thewireless.co.nz/themes/change/living-in-an-ageing-society
Look at all those empty houses...
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Speaker: David Fisher: The OIA arms race, in reply to Jan Rivers,
Productivity Commission
Every time I see that term I chuckle.
Military Intelligence.
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So, up until I left the public service a few months ago, I regularly used to phone people back who had made requests. It was simply easier and less time consuming - you could explore what they were trying to get at and help figure it out with them. It sounds like I was lucky to work in an organisation that truly assumed information should be public unless there was a good reason not to.
Fair to say this is anathema to the private sector - people who have joined the service from business treat OIA's like competitive espionage. They struggle with the idea that the product of public agencies is community property...
David has absolutely nailed this - fear entered the public service towards the end of the Clarke government. I can't put my finger on when the (incorrect) notion that OIA's had to be in writing took hold, but I think that timing sounds about right.
And the fact that senior public servants are very well paid nowadays causes an interesting dilemma: if you are a Deputy {Sec/Com/etc} in Wellington on $250-300k+, where else can you get a job if you screw your public sector reputation? Time was that resignation from the service would eventually lead to a pay rise...
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So... just a technical point for context...
When you wish to make a forensic examination of digital stuff, and you think there may be encrypted containers (either on the premise or in the cloud) you take everything, including video and photos of the books and CD's on the shelves. Taking all those CD's out of their cases can be a bit time consuming...
The reason you do all this is to assist with your brute-force attack if you find an encrypted container. You load all the digital content from the site(s) into your attack dictionary.
Often people use a song from their favourite album, the opening sentence of a book, or they will use a similar password that they might have emailed to someone in another context. People commonly use their ex-partners middle name with a year combination tacked or whatever. Your stuff will possibly have that name in it somewhere, so it means you get there a bit faster.
Anyway, the more stuff you load in the dictionary, the faster it is to crack it generally speaking. This is one of the reasons the really good whistleblower protection systems use an air gap.
There is quite a lot of case law about the use of digital evidence. It has to be pre-checked for issues of privilege, which in this case I presume extends to journalistic protection. But its use by a machine as a mechanism to assist decryption (i.e. in a way where no human actually looks at any of it) is to my knowledge untested.