John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, was ejected from the country's parliamentary debating chamber yesterday when he repeated ignored the Speaker of the House's calls to yield the floor, continuing to rant even after his microphone had been cut off.
The New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is trying to ram through legislation to legalize the kind of domestic surveillance that the US NSA and the UK GCHQ have engaged in. When asked whether he thought he had popular support for allowing the government to spy on New Zealanders' entire online lives, he refused to answer the question and kept changing the subject to fishing quotas (seriously). — Read the rest
Juha Saarinen sez,
— Read the restNew Zealand media were raided by police last November just before the general election, after the incumbent centre-right Prime Minister John Key made a criminal complaint over a recording of a conversation in a cafe between him and far right-wing politician John Banks during a staged media event.
NZ Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick was giving a speech in favour of stricter carbon emissions standards when the 50-year-old National Party Climate Critic Todd Muller heckled her; without missing a beat, she fired back "OK Boomer" and moved on to making a rather good and eloquent point about need for intense action on climate.
New Zealand is one of the Five Eyes countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) who collaborate on mass surveillance, and it has a notoriously off-leash, invasive surveillance apparatus that has been caught spying on NZ Greenpeace, the NZ Green Party, the Mana Movements and anti-TPP activists; the state was also caught giving private corporate spies access to its national surveillance data to help them hunt down and neutralize activists; unsurprisingly, the NZ police also abused these records, accessing them without a warrant on thousands of occasions (NZ also recruited the NSA to spy on kiwi activists).
A joint report by RNZ, TVNZ and Nicky Hager accuses New Zealand of being at the heart of a gigantic money-laundering operation for the corrupt elites of Latin America.
"John Doe," the mysterious whistleblower who released the largest-ever leak of confidential documents in world history — papers from the Panamanian law firm Mossack-Fonseca, a key player in the offshore dark money industry — has published their first-ever public statement.
The secretly negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership will cost New Zealand a fortune — the extension of its copyright from 50 to 70 years alone will suck NZD55,000,000/year out of its economy — but it's supposed to get the benefit of increased trade with the major powers in the treaty, especially Japan and the USA.
In a huge victory for press freedom, New Zealand's High Court has ruled decisively in favor of independent journalist Nicky Hager in his case against the New Zealand government for raiding his house and seizing his family's possessions in 2014. — Read the rest
NZ Prime Minister John Key is a racist blowhard who has smeared the opposition parties of "backing the rapists" for their support of NZ citizens with minor criminal convictions (not sexual assault, incidentally) being deported from Australia, where they have been imprisoned.
On October 6th, New Zealand police raided the house of one of the country's best independent investigative journalists, Nicky Hager, seizing many of his family's belongings and his reporting equipment—all in the search for one of his sources. This is a flagrant violation of basic press freedom rights, and today we are announcing a campaign to assist Hager in raising money for his legal defense. — Read the rest
Dotcom claims he has emails between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Warner exec Kevin Tsujihara in which Tsujihara explains that Dotcom was followed by private security in Hong Kong and that Key had made the extradition promise to Warner as part of the deal to shoot The Hobbit in NZ (the MPAA, Warner and Key's office all dispute the email's authenticity).
GCSB, New Zealand's secret police force has admitted to illegally deleting key evidence related to the raid on Kim Dotcom over his Megaupload service. The spies agree that the evidence was illegally deleted, but claim it was an honest mistake, because the data "aged off" their retention system.
Among those ready to snarf: A stoner-eyed teenager, wearing a neon yellow astronaut’s helmet; a young woman with electric blue hair, and an enigmatic middle-aged film technician with a Cosmo Kramer haircut who competes under his nom de food “The Dog Hammer.” Jason Gilbert reports.
The founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, will meet arch-nemesis New Zealand Prime Minister John Key for the first time Wednesday, when lawmakers "examine a controversial proposal allowing intelligence agencies to spy on local residents." [Raw Story]
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued an official apology to Kim Dotcom for illegal spying conducted by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) — the NZ equivalent to the CIA, which is prohibited from engaging in domestic spying. Nevertheless, GCSB conducted a program of surveillance against Dotcom and his associates as part of the US-led shutdown of Megaupload, Dotcom's file-locker service, which had angered the US entertainment industry. — Read the rest
Juha writes,
— Read the restThe Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key, is angry that a conversation between him and a rightwing candidate for Parliament was recorded by a cameraman – so angry that he's reported the matter to the police which is now going to raid TVNZ, Radio NZ, TV3 and another, unnamed media organisation.
Street demonstrations, netwide campaigns, unfavorable press attention and sustained lobbying have moved the New Zealand government to temporarily suspend its new copyright law, which would have required ISPs to terminate their customers' net access on the basis of three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement. — Read the rest
