Posts by Stephen Judd
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webweaver, that pretty much is at the root of my concerns as well. The US and the UK have gone nuts.
And we all complacently think that NZ is different and sound and sensible, but you know, the US constitution and all their traditions and institutions haven't been enough to prevent them turning into a state where any abuse, from torture to detention without trial to massive warrant-less surveillance to simple harassment of photographers and artists and schoolkids and non-conformists, can be justified by the magic word "terrorism." If I have to become cranky and shrill and, god forbid, mad in order to keep these concerns alive, well so be it.
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Perhaps they are mad, Neil. Mad, and deeply concerned with my civil liberties. I am aware that they are polemicists and agitators, and set filters accordingly.
Meanwhile, the Labour party has presided over extensions of state powers of surveillance year on year, and the best the agencies entrusted with them can come up with is a bunch of firearms offences - which have yet to be proven. Which brings me to:
"benefit of the doubt given to crazy people with guns"
Really? Where's your presumption of innocence? Is it possible that among the people arrested it will turn out some are quite sane, and don't have guns? I think it is.
Likewise, I think it's touchingly naive to believe that the police are unaffected by institutional imperatives, or that they always get it right, or that they wouldn't do something for no reason. We have had abundant evidence over the years that senior officers can and do make all sorts of mistakes. It isn't demonising them to take that into account when assessing police statements.
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Shep, it was a symposium with Nicky Hager, Jane Kelsey, Moana Jackson and David Small, organised by the Postgraduate Student Associate at VUW. I am going to blog about it tomorrow, because I took a lot of notes and I don't want them to go to waste, but (irony) the whole thing was recorded and I understand it will be up on the PGSA website soon.
Right now thought I really, really need a drink.
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Re the leakage: I've just spent all day listing to, among other people, Moana Jackson and others working on the defence.
They are very clear that whoever is leaking a) isn't them and b) is trying to rescue the police and c) is wrecking the chances for a fair trial on the remaining charges.
I have to say I'm feeling bad about some of the things I have said earlier about suppression of information, because I have a new-found appreciation of how a fair trial depends on letting that information come out in its proper context, the court. The public interest in fair trials is actually more important than the public curiosity.
(It's also been a very draining, disturbing, down-the-rabbithole day in terms of what I've learned about the extent of SIS and police surveillance, but that's another story.)
Apropos terror laws: we need to take a sanguine look at the country we live in and ask ourselves about the reality of the threats we face. We have to ask ourselves, exactly what real and present threat these laws address, and whether the sacrifice in our civil liberties is worth it. More and more, I feel that it isn't. Discussing hypotheticals - what if some hypothetical group X tries to commit act Y - is all very well but we have to consider the likelihood of these scenarios as well as the possibility. Monkeys might fly out my butt, but I don't feel the expenditure on reinforced underwear is warranted.
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rodgerd, the issue re people being jailed is whether they deserved to be bailed or not. Yes, you probably won't get bail if you're arrested waving a gun around. But for a firearms offence committed earlier in another city? There was a guy up on multiple firearms charges that very same week who did get bail. For me the issue is not whether activists should be exempt from being remanded in custody, which is clearly nonsense, the issue is whether the police were applying the same standard in opposing bail for them as they apply in other cases.
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There is a trend of people calling controversial legislation "incoherent", when it probably just needs to be clarified or amended.
Who'd've thought New Zealand's Solicitor-General would be a mindless follower of trends, eh?
Lots of countries have anti-terror laws. I for one am against terrorism.
What are you trying to say here? That the rest of us might be for terrorism?
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I'm just queuing this up now.
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Tim, was that meant sarcastically or not? I honestly can't tell.
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An interesting point from Collins yesterday.
It seems police sought to use the TSA because they used it as the basis for many of their interception warrants. Collins did say they looked but there was no other statute that would have allowed them the approach they took.
You say that like it's a bad thing. It's supposed to be hard for the police to get inception powers, and it's only ever justified when something really terrible seems likely to happen.
If the police were invoking the act merely to use those interception powers, which is an inference one might draw from Collins' statement, that would be a Bad Thing, and precisely the kind of abuse we have seen happening in other jurisdictions (eg in the US with their PATRIOT act).
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Perhaps part of my anxious insistence on this is based on the fear that my marvellous and currently fairly useful capacity for just soaking stuff up, and making good guesses about what I don't know, might be an obsolete party trick pretty soon.