PM releases report into Dotcom surveillance

29/09/2012 1:37:41 p.m.

Jim Seaview wrote:

QUOTE 1: "The director of the GCSB, Ian Fletcher, has this afternoon apologised for the way the bureau handled the case. “We got this wrong,” he said. “Both factual errors and unacceptable errors of legal interpretation were compounded, most especially by our treating those interpretations as fact for too long. It should not have happened.” QUOTE 2: Mr Fletcher says he knows it will take time for the bureau to regain the trust and confidence that has been lost. “But I also know that we will be able to do so, and be able to re-establish the high standard of accountability expected of us.” WITH ALL THE RESOURCES of the NZ Government the GCSB could not determine whether Mr Dotcom had NZ Residency. Surely you could have phoned Mr Dotcom and asked him!!! The GCSB has displayed a level incompetancy that defies all logic and was paid for by the hard working, overtaxed, overRated, diligent, struggling tax payer and we did not receive value for our tax dollars. Mr Fletcher - your organisation was there to protect the security of the people of New Zealand, not to spy on bonafide residents carrying out their normal, (legal in NZ) business activity. The GCSB has to be re-established with competant staff. The existing staff have to go. Einstein once said "you cannot fix the problems of this world by the level of thinking that created them?" I didnt realise that Albert had ever studied NZ Politics!! Spy world is all about perception and value for money.

29/09/2012 1:39:42 a.m.

Key is a flystrip PM Jonno wrote:

Rob (at 9:22:59 pm), of course you can find out the truth. Here's some to get you started... Perfect10 is a CIA related internet porn company. Their goal is to smear reputations and drag people into interminably long and dollar consuming legal battles. Dotcom is a Perfect10 target because he has a thing for operating independently and his Megaupload service inadvertently helped less powerful people to produce and share their own large files of everything from home-made musical performances to home recorded footage produced in difficult to access global hot-spots...

29/09/2012 1:19:11 a.m.

dennis wrote:

To Robert. The impression from the tone of the information laid may have have resulted an intended impression. I can assure you it is exaggerated. For example, 3 of the counts (racketeering, money laundering and copyright infringement) are alleged as conspiracy between directors and employees of the Company. It is put to the Grand Jury that these gentlemen were part of a World wide criminal conspiracy. In actual fact, none of them have a criminal record other than a very minor detail from filing a paper out of time in Honk Kong. You will read that Mr Dotcom did have a computer hacking conviction many years ago and was also charged and convicted on an insider trading charge about 10 years ago. I believe that these convictions are now wiped in the origin countries and he came here with a clean slate. I presume in answering immigration questioning he is presented with the awkward question about criminal record. Although having a clean slate, and his past history wiped, he still answered the questions honestly and declared the convictions that had been wiped. As they effectively no longer exist that information should have gone nowhere other than to whom it was passed. To attempt to ignore the clean slate would, in my view, be contempt of the other country's Law and Court. The term you have used "copyright burning" indicates that you have a wrong impression of his business activity. Effectively he has a huge computer network storage facility (like a warehouse) that he leases at a cost of more than $10million a year and anyone can put files there for storage and then access them at a later date or from another place. The problem is that many people, for whatever reason, leave their data open for anyone to access. So the allegation is that there is a regime in America requiring Americans who operate such public storage facilities and internet service providers in general, to police this access and remove any public links to copyrighted works. There are civil remedies for this form of breach and literally huge amounts can be sought in damages by that remedy. However, somehow this company, and this country are being used to form a test case to see if criminal liability is a remedy to alleged breaches. This form of secondary infringement has never been charged as a criminal offence in New Zealand and according to Megaupload's lawyer neither in the USA. His money was earned by advertising on the web pages and a fee if you wish to increase the speed of the data transfer. Otherwise the service was free. If, for example, you wished to send a 40 megabyte file to Justice Paul Neazor your email provider will probably require that to be broken into 3 different files. For free you could send the complete file to Megaupload and just send a 'link' which is a unique string of letters or characters, to Paul. Hence there are primarily non-infringing uses. Thank you for you interest if you have read this far. If you were at all interested to find out more there is an interview between Campbell and Dotcom that basically repeats what I have attempted to explain. That you may access at http://kim.com