Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws

An anonymous reader writes "New revelations about Ministerial orders requiring backdoors into online services in New Zealand are fueling nationwide protests against new surveillance powers to be granted to the Government Communications Services Bureau. Speaking at one large protest meeting, Kim Dotcom described the 'Five Eyes' X-Keyscore surveillance system as 'Google for spies'. He told protesters he first noticed he was being spied on when his internet speed slowed by '20 to 30 milliseconds'. 'As a gamer, I noticed,' he said."

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[gstoddart]

Just because you were right doesn't make you not a paranoid loon

And being a paranoid loon doesn't mean you're wrong either -- sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.

Because every single one of them is ramping up towards the full surveillance society with every step.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who knows top tier FPS players, 20-30 ms difference in ping is noticable. It was amusing to watch frag counts increase when one of them switched to a high grade 120hz panel from his much older lcd with a high response time. Do they assume someone is spying on them when they lag? No. Does it actually affect them when it happens. YES.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a 9-5er, your phone records, internet metadata, and search records are in a database, waiting for the day you become "elevated."

Re: I can tell from the pixels

[Dputiger]

What I suspect actually occurred was this: Almost all games report latency as an averaged value over n period of time. It's entirely possible that Dotcom's *average* latency went up 20-30ms because the network grabbing introduced substantially higher spikes. If a game takes one measure a second and reports the averaged value over 10 seconds, you can end up with a series like this:

100
100
180
100
150
100
100
180
100
100

Average Latency = 121ms.

So if his old latency was "100ms" and now it's "121ms" then Dotcom says "I immediately noticed a 20ms difference. But he didn't. What he actually noticed were the spikes up to 150 - 180ms that were then averaged out to produce a 20ms reported difference.

What Protests?

[Anonymous Coward]

What protests? I live in New Zealand and are yet to see any! The new surveillance law "protests" are being whipped up by the media and the left.

Re:Protest all you want

[Hairy1]

How did that 'voting for different people' work out for you guys in the US? There was Obama saying that he wouldn't allow illegal spying, and now where are you?

Last night we had politicians talking about what they would do, but what you didn't hear was rousing speeches from them (or at least not from David Shearer) defending the principles of freedom. There was a narrow focus on the one piece of legislation while at the same time other legislation threatens to allow the Government to install spying equipment directly into ISPs so they don't have to ask these ISPs for cooperation. Yeah - direct feeds that they can examine without restriction.

Voting is a blunt instrument that is virtually no use at all. In a single party system like you have in New Zealand and the US, where the same party has two faces and simply takes turns while maintaining overall control, there is no functional way for people to make a change unless we vote for REALLY different people.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Pinkfud]

Yes, and the idea that they "don't look at it" is not really true either. Every piece of collected data is sifted by computer algorithms that look for key words, etc. If any are found, a flag is set. That qualifies as "looking at it" IMO. Now, the system probably produces so many flags that they still can't actually read all of them. If I had that problem, I would sort the flagged data into arrays so I could look for patterns. If the same person gets flagged a set number of times, or the flags show something like keyword X and keyword Y, then his stuff gets read by a real person. The problem with that is that the message content would have to be kept so it could be examined if needed. Simply stated, I do not believe only metadata is kept. It would be useless if it couldn't be put into context when something odd is detected.