Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Privacy Government

Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws 138

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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws

Comments Filter:
  • 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.

    Yeah, I think that's about as credible as the old meme, "This looks shopped / I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time."

    Just because you were right doesn't make you not a paranoid loon if that's the first assumption you came up with.

    • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:15PM (#44609583) Homepage

      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.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:38PM (#44609805)

        Bollocks... If there is no toilet paper you can just assume that the toilet cam is not being monitored.....

      • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @02:13PM (#44610229) Homepage

        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.

        I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk [wikipedia.org].

      • by jb11 ( 2683015 )
        Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
        • on the same coin, just because your paranoid doesn't mean your worth spying on. You must ask yourself a honest question, is your life in any way meaningful enough for the surveillance state to spy on? While i could be wrong, my general thoughts on that is no, there is few people worth spying on and your conversation with your mother, or even your drug dealer is not exactly what they are looking for.

          In a way this surveillance is a boon to anyone who wants to hide anything. They collect so much info that i ca

          • They collect so much info that i cant imagine it would be easy to sift through. With a little bit of technology you can hide anything you want, from anyone you want.

            -1, naivete

          • by jb11 ( 2683015 )
            Actually, it was a joke and reference to a line from Catch-22, but thanks for the response.
          • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

            You must ask yourself a honest question, is your life in any way meaningful enough for the surveillance state to spy on?

            No, YOU must ask yourself how lucky you feel. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.". They just need to hold on to the "evidence" long enough and eventually they can put you away for something. That's not you being important, that's your government grabbing you by the balls. By the way that quote was from the Cardinal Richelieu - a well known French tyrant.

          • You must ask yourself a honest question, is your life in any way meaningful enough for the surveillance state to spy on? While i could be wrong, my general thoughts on that is no.

            So, basically you're saying "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". If so, you're an idiot.

            I'd like to tell you that you deserve to live in that world. But that means the rest of us would have to as well.

            Think of the McCarthy Era, or the worst stories about the Soviets -- and that's the kind of world you live in

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 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.

    • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      We aren't all equally likely to be surveilled. I guess if you're a 9-5er who only goes to work and the grocery store, has a wife and kids, and watches the game on sunday, you don't have much to worry about. I'll bet 15% of the people who post here are or were on some kind of elevated watchlist at some point. A little paranoia is justified. Now someone like kim dotcom is definitely justified.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:42PM (#44609875)

        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."

      • by RabidReindeer ( 2625839 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:49PM (#44609961)

        We aren't all equally likely to be surveilled. I guess if you're a 9-5er who only goes to work and the grocery store, has a wife and kids, and watches the game on sunday, you don't have much to worry about. I'll bet 15% of the people who post here are or were on some kind of elevated watchlist at some point. A little paranoia is justified. Now someone like kim dotcom is definitely justified.

        I take it you've been living in a cave for the last 6 months.

        If you live in or have any contact with the USA, you're 100% likely to be surveilled. They've admitted as much thanks to Snowden.

        The only question is what depth the surveillance goes to. Whether it's just basic Metadata collection ("just in case") or being fed to the intelligence woodchipper. And, since so much of the mechanisms are statistically-driven, it has less to do with your innocence as it does with how well you shake out from the statistical analysis. For all you know, you're dropping off your laundry next door to an Arab charity and your GPS data triggers a flag.

      • So the kid hits a baseball through the neighbors window and being angry he sends an anonymous tip to the feds that you have fertilizer in your shed. Never mind that it was only a one bag or that you also have a well kept garden but they have to take the time to investigate. Which is only one of many reasons I have a problem with this.

        Ok this has not happened to me however I have had neighbors do some fairly messed up things. Like make a complaint to the city because my car was sitting in the driveway with a

    • by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:33PM (#44609747) Homepage Journal

      Just because you were right doesn't make you not a paranoid loon if that's the first assumption you came up with.

      Funny, you must be reading a different summary; the one I see says nothing about it being "the first assumption [he] came up with," but rather that he noticed a slowdown. How do we know that he didn't subsequently verify his suspicion w/ a packet capture and trace? TFA doesn't bother to clarify the statement.

      But hey, don't let that keep you from attacking a guy because of what you perceive he meant.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:36PM (#44609791)

      are you perhaps retarded?

      not only is that kind of delay noticeable by anyone with a bit of experience with networks, Kim Dotcom had FIBER OPTIC CABLE INSTALLED WITH 1-HOP ACCESS TO SUBSEA CABLES.

      A 20ms increase in latency would be a WTF is wrong with our hundred-million dollar infrastructure, not just a gamer who felt he had too high latency as an excuse for bad KDR.

      • by Dputiger ( 561114 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:47PM (#44609931)

        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.

      • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

        not only is that kind of delay noticeable by anyone with a bit of experience with networks, Kim Dotcom had FIBER OPTIC CABLE INSTALLED WITH 1-HOP ACCESS TO SUBSEA CABLES.

        Sweet. Where do I get myself one of those and how much does it cost?

    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:42PM (#44609871) Journal
      Dotcom's claims of noticing an extra 20ms 'as a gamer' rather than 'as somebody looking at the ping displayed next to various multiplayer serves' are somewhat dubious; but there are a few additional details [nzherald.co.nz] to his story.

      Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.
      • Noticing an additional 20ms - 30ms of ping doesn't have anything to do with gamer's or humans' reaction time.
        Nobody will notice that some opponent dies 20ms - 30ms later than before.

        You notice it because the gameplay simply feels differently.

        FPS are the most sensitive to ping changes.
        RTS & Moba are much more forgiving when it comes to pings.

        In FPS it feels like the bullets don't hit where they're supposed to.
        Let's say someone sees on his monitor how his crosshair was to the very left of his opponent's h

    • I'm currently queuing for a BF game as I type and it gives me a nice list of server pings - and they start at around 10. If I looked tomorrow and the lowest I could see was 30ms then I'd think something was up.
      Now playing a game I couldn't swear I'd notice the additional 20ms, but I'd notice if a delay suddenly appeared between me and all the servers.
    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      20 to 30 milliseconds is a big change for your line speed. I'd notice that because I have a few servers that I more or less know the round trip times too. If you have ping times 20 to 30 milliseconds less than other people in the same area on the same ISP it's time to start worrying.

      If I was him I'd pgp some abusive text crypted with an easy to guess password and send that though netcat on a few random ports. See how much nonsense data these spy monkies want to store.

    • If your ping in a game is normally 50ms and it starts being consistently closer to 90ms, then it's right to suspect something is up.

    • Actually if you painted a big fat bullseye on your butt like he did, I would consider that to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
      He knew it was coming.

      Would have been awesome to mess with them once he knew.
      Googling for "How to make bombs" and "What to do when the FBI have tapped your internet" would have been hilarious.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:19PM (#44609613)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:35PM (#44609761) Journal

    But unless you vote for different people, and vote them out when they screw up, you will accomplish nothing. They won't be spoon fed to you by mass media. You have to seek them out, and vote them in. There is no other peaceful alternative. They will have you shooting at each other while they laugh all the way to the bank. That's your global, gangster run politics in a nutshell.

    • by Hairy1 ( 180056 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @03:21PM (#44611013) Homepage

      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.

      • by Seumas ( 6865 )

        The funny thing is, it took most people more than five years to catch on to his bullshit, while -- if you paid attention to the news and recalled what he campaigned on -- he was shitting all over everything from the first quarter of his first term.

        Don't worry, people will vote the same way in 2016. They'll be positive that we're only ONE ELECTION away from everything getting better. Until it doesn't and the guy that wins fucks them in the ass again.

      • Oh stop it... Anybody who was half awake knew that Obama was no different from the rest. And when he confirmed it, he was reelected anyway. People sleep through the elections like they do in between them, and wait for their choices to be hand fed, so screw them. It's their own damn fault when 98% of them vote for the status quo. People have to look beyond the propaganda. If they don't, then there is little, if any hope. Nobody is going to do it for them. We are on our own here, and it's best to get wise to

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You don't get to choose when to vote. And you don't get to choose who gets elected, because your vote is just one vote in a sea of stupid votes by stupid people. The world is FULL of stupid people, but they have exactly the same voting right as you. And they'll vote because some candidate has a hot wife, or they like his name, or they like the color of his skin, or the like the obvious lie he told, or they've always voted for "that party", etc. There are hundreds of reasons NOT to vote for someone that stup

      • Okay, sounds like another vote against majority rule.. If we can enough people to vote that way we can change to some other system...

    • by suutar ( 1860506 )
      The problem is that it takes a very large value of "you" for this to work. Barring a cultural shift where failure to keep abreast of politics is considered idiocy on the scale of forgetting to wear pants, I don't see it happening.
  • Coordinated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:40PM (#44609837)
    It's almost as if this new level of citizen surveillance has been coordinated globally. But, how could this be? What international organization would want to do such a thing? #thingsthatmakeyougohmmmmmm
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Oh please.

      This has nothing to do with any global conspiracy. It has everything to do with "they do it, so why can't we?" and "look at the problems they have from uncontrolled masses in nation X - we have to protect the status quo from it".

      It has nothing to do with anything except fear and power. Quite sad.

      I'm in Canada. My latency has been increasing too. Some call it "buffer bloat". Others call it something different. For example, I've noticed that I get major ping increases not between cities, but at the

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It was a thing that organically came into being in the United States not because of some grand nefarious organization, but by many tiny tyrants that saw it as the best choice for them. There was no conspiracy, just an ad-hoc system that became self organized. The same is happening with surveillance in an age of massive empowerment of average people through a world-wide communication medium. People that have power don't like it and will try to control it. This is just the first step: reconnaissance.

      You can t

    • It's almost as if this new level of citizen surveillance has been coordinated globally. But, how could this be? What international organization would want to do such a thing? #thingsthatmakeyougohmmmmmm

      I have seen similar oddities in the pro-business propaganda that is being spread worldwide. It does seem as though there is some coordination going on both with surveillance and business friendly legislation. I haven't researched it much so I can't say for sure (it's not like I'm totally up on the laws of other countries, let alone my own).

      We do know that organizations like the Bilderberg Group, CFR, Trilateral Commission and ICC exist to further the interests of international businessmen and the Elite.

  • by Hairy1 ( 180056 ) on Monday August 19, 2013 @01:45PM (#44609905) Homepage

    Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries. It is now being turned on those who fund it. However, it must be understood in the context of the countries which are working together. New Zealand is probably spying on citizens of the United States - and that information is being passed back. In fact there are no New Zealanders in the loop - the US gets direct feeds from its spy base here.

    It is clear from how Assange, Snowden, KimDotcom, Swartz, Manning, David Miranda and many others have been treated that current administrations are the enemies of freedom. They are supporting a state of affairs more rrepressive and functionally more effective than George Orwells 1984. That a New Zealand Government has been complicit with this pains me.

    Let us not forget that the instant that Islamic fundamentalist 'terrorists' once more become useful the US has been willing to arm them. The Syrian rebels are fundamentalists that will no doubt implement strict religious law like the Taliban should the be victorious in Syria. Is this the kind of "Freedom" the US want? The US at one point at least made a good showing of standing for something. It now makes no effort to even disguise its true position, with its clients such as the UK doing its bidding by harassing people like David Miranda in relation to the Snowden leaks. Far from protecting us from terrorists they are once more funding them.

    Who will stand for freedom?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You mean like when we were involved in the 'Opening of Japan'?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The US at one point at least made a good showing of standing for something.

      When? No, seriously. Remember slavery? Remember how women used to barely have any rights? Remember the internment of Japanese citizens? Remember what the whole civil rights movement was about? That's just to name a few things.

      When was this golden era of freedom in the US? As far as I'm concerned, it never existed.

    • by hacker ( 14635 )

      Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries.

      But wait, that also means that at least 51% of the population actually voted for those who put these laws and legislation into effect. Can the same people who voted them into power, also vote them out?

      • But wait, that also means that at least 51% of the population actually voted for those who put these laws and legislation into effect.

        No it doesn't. The current NZ government is a minority government, and the 3x parties that make up government were voted for by 48.98% of the voters. So almost precisely 51% in fact voted for someone else (and voting isn't compulsory, either, and roughly 1/4 of eligible voters didn't bother).

        Several minor parties ultimately polled too low to get any seats in parliament, so the proportion of seats doesn't always reflect how the votes were proportioned.

      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        As the sibling says, often in parliamentary democracies you get the tyranny of the minority, which can be worse then the tyranny of the majority. Canada's current government, a majority which with the party discipline that Westminster type governments have, can pass almost any laws it wants, was elected with 38% of the voters that bothered to vote.

    • Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries. It is now being turned on those who fund it. However, it must be understood in the context of the countries which are working together. New Zealand is probably spying on citizens of the United States - and that information is being passed back. In fact there are no New Zealanders in the loop - the US gets direct feeds from its spy base here.

      It is clear from how Assange, Snowden, KimDotcom, Swartz, Manning, David Miranda and many others have been treated that current administrations are the enemies of freedom. They are supporting a state of affairs more rrepressive and functionally more effective than George Orwells 1984. That a New Zealand Government has been complicit with this pains me.

      Let us not forget that the instant that Islamic fundamentalist 'terrorists' once more become useful the US has been willing to arm them. The Syrian rebels are fundamentalists that will no doubt implement strict religious law like the Taliban should the be victorious in Syria. Is this the kind of "Freedom" the US want? The US at one point at least made a good showing of standing for something. It now makes no effort to even disguise its true position, with its clients such as the UK doing its bidding by harassing people like David Miranda in relation to the Snowden leaks. Far from protecting us from terrorists they are once more funding them.

      Who will stand for freedom?

      Well said. You point out that the US is once again arming Islamic fundamentalists. This to me puts the lie to the claim that any of this is really about terrorism or extremism. That's just the crap they trot out to whip up the masses. The governments don't really care about terrorism; they care about maintaining and expanding their power. That's what this is going on here.

    • by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      the US survived mccartyism when public support turned against it. Same thing is happening now.
  • 4 5 6 7 9
    This is what it's come 2
    All the time
    Numbers, numbers in my eyes
    Digits pointing to the skies
    Flying into buildings
    4 Justification
    Numbered people
    Numbered nations
    Dodging the demons
    On number stations

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I guess someone finally noticed that giant tower with the flaming red eye perched atop it.

  • See? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The NSA screwed it up for everyone. Now no countries will be able to illegally spy on their citizens..

  • I bet if I go for a walk at lunch time, there will be at least 10, maybe 15 long haired hippies loitering around the beehive.

    As long as they don't do what the asset sales "protesters" did, and pitch a tent on the grass area around the war memorial, killing the grass and desecrating what is a symbol of the sacrifice our fallen soldiers made for our country.

    • The soldiers who fought for freedom you mean? The soldiers that gave their lives to defeat an oppressive regime? I wonder what those soldiers would think of their own government spying on them?
      Fuck off, troll

  • At the moment in NZ we have complacency amongst the population. Most kiwis oppose it, but accept it as they have bought into the "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" ideology. The only conceivable reason to believe this and spread this nonsense is confirmation bias. They believe it and spread it because it confirms the political bias they have.

    Those who come up with the "if you have nothing to hide" bullshit are enablers through excuse. The human right to privacy has precedent in the Unit

  • The Auckland Town Hall was packed (capacity 1500) with people having to be turned away at the door. Some people had flown in from other parts of the country to attend. The commitment shown by some was impressive, and at the same time it was infuriating to know that for everyone single person who was there, there are hundreds in the population who not only weren't there, but also can't care less about the topic.

    The 89% objection number that people like to mention here doesn't mean what you think it does: Onl

    • Since NZ has no written constitution, or supreme law, those freedoms that make NZ one of the freest countries are established by legislation. Parliament can eliminate them at will if they wanted to.
  • All this talk of NZ spying on its own citizens made me wonder - is my SSL traffic intercepted via man-in-the-middle (MitM)?

    Using Steve Gibson's cert hash checker https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm [grc.com] I checked a few common SSL encrypted sites to see if my traffic was being intercepted. At work it is (not by my employer- I run the network) but at home it wasn't (Slingshot's my home ISP). Google.co.nz was one of the sites that appeared to have MitM interception, whereas my online banking wasn't.

    I have to keep

  • Where is our Declaration of Independence authority to put off bad government?
    Or is it just that people haven't woken up enough to apply it?
     

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. -- Alan Perlis

Working...