Curious Kiwi

Kiwi from a blended family who wants a blended and united New Zealand.

[REALITY CHECK RADIO @RCR_NZ]

“I haven’t seen the media with deep thigh sweats over a party and an attractive articulate brunette since a certain toothy girl from Morrinsville got everyone het up in 2017.” — Maree Buscke @MacBuscke

A blunt observation on the level of media enthusiasm surrounding the newly launched Opportunity Party — and how quickly the hype cycle kicks in when a “fresh face” enters the frame.

Strip back the excitement. Watch the framing. Ask what’s actually being presented.

Stay ahead of the spin this election season. 📥 RCR Bites, FREE every weekday: https://t.co/bj3AROgWfe

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@TheRedbaiter Read the room @chrisluxonmp, NZers don't want the State to control the internet and we don't believe you're trying to 'protect the children' either.

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@chrisluxonmp What about protecting NZers from GMO foods?

[Douglas Brown @darkwaterjack]

This government is presiding over the greatest expansion of State surveillance capacity in NZ in recent memory. Done without fanfare, or even being minimised by govt Ministers. Three Bills, two before Parliament and one that is coming, are making these changes.

The first bill is the Telecommunications and Other Matters Bill. A small part of this Bill amends the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act 2013, changing only a couple of words, but the effect of those words is enormous. As a result of those changes, the government can now insist that overseas providers of end-to-end encrypted (E2E) communications provide it with an interception capability, a ‘backdoor’, into those communications.

Basically, the government is legislating to force WhatsApp, Signal, Apple’s Messages, Facebook Messenger, and any other E2E messaging service to give it ‘backdoor’ interception access when required. If they don’t, the government will be able to literally ban their use by New Zealanders.

When this was proposed overseas, messaging services and the tech community pushed back. For some reason, that hasn't happened here. The Free Speech Union and I opposed this, but the Select Committee has not chosen to listen to us, and the changes are going through. The only problem is that if the E2E messaging services were to provide such a backdoor, there would be no end-to-end encryption. A backdoor open to a government is open to everyone with the requisite skill to exploit it. The foreign governments backed down, but NZ is not deterred by technical impossibilities; it is made of sterner stuff than that!

The second bill amends the Policing Act. It has been presented by @MarkMitchellMP, the police minister, as simply restoring to the Police some common law powers taken away by a recent Supreme Court decision. That is patently and unequivocally false. The Police Commissioner is now also saying that it gives them the operational capacity to introduce body cameras, but that is disingenuous.

The wording of the Bill gives the Police powers that allow them to make an end run around the Privacy Act, the Search and Surveillance Act, and private property owners' rights, and that far exceed any common-law powers they ever had.

Historically, Police surveillance has been legally permitted only for people suspected of crimes. To be fair, the Police often forget this, hence the recent Court case, as well as the Privacy Commissioner and the IPCA throwing a fit at the Police a couple of years ago over randomly photographing young people for ‘intelligence purposes’. Under the new Act, surveillance will be allowed for ‘an intelligence purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police, or any other lawful purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police.’ In other words, the Police can conduct surveillance of the NZ public for any reason they can come up with. There is no limit.

Further, the Police will now have the authority to conduct surveillance against any private property, so long as they do it from a public space. The Police could, for example, legally set up a surveillance site in a hillside park that could easily look into private property, 24 hours a day. No warrant required; no suspicion of wrongdoing needed, even. They just need to “consider that the information will or may support the Police in performing a function, or carrying out an activity, of the Police”.

And if they can’t be bothered coming up with a reason like that, they can do it under the ‘any other lawful purpose’ justification. Like, I don’t know, checking every backyard in the city for a cannabis grow.

Except that if they are using the same camera they use on the Eagle helicopter, they can see more than your backyard; they can read what is written on the paper stuck to your fridge door.

When the Police Minister says that the law simply gives the Police back powers they already had, it is so wrong as to be laughable.

Then there is the third piece of legislation, the so-called under-16 social media ban. Which hasn’t even been introduced yet, but for which the Dept. of Internal Affairs has already been given $30 million to implement.

This legislation will require every person in New Zealand to provide proof of age to every designated social media platform before accessing social media. If you are over 16, you will be permitted to continue. In fact, assuming we adopt the Australian model, the government won’t have to designate a platform; unless a platform is excluded, it will be subject to the requirement to perform an age-check.

In other words, the government is going to impose a gate on your access to social media. This will include platforms you might not consider social media; so long as you use that platform to communicate with others or receive communication from them, they qualify. You will have to show your age and, almost certainly, your identity, before you can use it. If you choose not to provide that information to the social media platform, you will not be permitted to use it.

The government has not provided us with any reasons why this is necessary. It has not provided any research that justifies it. There is no overwhelming evidence that it is necessary. And it is clear that, although superficially popular, when the methods necessary to implement it become known, it becomes exceptionally unpopular. Yet, the Minister for State Control, @EricaStanfordMP, is keen to proceed with this as soon as possible. That is because this is not based on evidence, but on ideology.

The ideology it's based on is not just about keeping children safe, a noble concept that relies on strongly debatable and heavily contested social science. It is also about protecting them from information that politicians and activists don't like. Misinformation, disinformation, harmful information, call it what you will. Politicians can dress it up as protecting children from harm, but when it boils down to it, the UK government in recent days has come into the open with the reasons why it feels a need to take control of social media, especially for under-16s, but even for older young people. Or adults.

The recent attempted beheading of a Belfast man, which saw riots following the distribution of the video on social media, particularly on this platform, prompted the UK Labour government to immediately call for controls on this platform, plus explicit calls for control of social media algorithms in order to prevent what is called misinformation from spreading. In fact, what the UK government wanted was for genuine, truthful information to be prevented from spreading, so that bad news it didn't like would not spread, and criticism of its policies and the consequent public response to their effects would not be felt.

But this policy is doomed to failure. The Australian implementation has shown that it is easily circumvented, not only by using a VPN, but also by children themselves, who find simple workarounds.

It also creates a privacy and information-protection nightmare for the people of any country in which it is implemented. The UK is already finding this out through its existing online safety laws and is now looking at banning VPNs and other measures that might be used to circumvent the rules.

To comply with laws designed to satisfy regulators, social media platforms, or the security firms they use to ensure their customers are over the age of 16, have to store some form of data. Unfortunately, that makes them an irresistible target for hackers. Even government systems in places like Estonia and India have been targeted and breached. More recently, Discord was breached, leading to the identification of a huge amount of its users' private data.

There is also the problem of what happens with the next government or the one after that. Whilst a supposedly centre-right government may say it is only concerned about the safety of children on social media, the Department of Internal Affairs has no such pretensions. It simply wants to regulate the internet, and it will do so by any means necessary. It will spend its time patiently convincing politicians, if not this government, then the next or the one after that, to allow it to become a super-regulator, imposing its view of what is acceptable on the public of New Zealand. And you'd be surprised at what the Department of Internal Affairs considers acceptable or not. I assure you, they do not align with the views of the average New Zealander. Put bluntly, the Department of Internal Affairs is a pack of wowsers.

Which brings me back to the beginning. This is all being done under a @NZNationalParty-led coalition government. The biggest increase in state surveillance capacity in a generation is being undertaken by a supposedly centre-right government. That is because the National Party lacks senior politicians with a strong commitment to liberty. People like Erica Stanford and Mark Mitchell are politicians whose first impulse is to use the power of the State to ensure the safety of the people, as they see it. Whether the people like it or not. And they have been quite open about that.

For Ministers such as @chrisluxonmp, Stanford, and Mitchell, an increase in the government's power over the private individual is a feature, not a bug. Keeping children and the public safe is worth trampling on the freedom and privacy rights of those same people, or invading the family in order to be a Nanny State.

After all, you cannot put a price on public safety, now, can you?

https://t.co/OSDIKG7j82

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Declassified documents confirm what I've been saying for years: Anthony Fauci didn't just fund dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. He personally shaped what the intelligence community told the American people about COVID's origins. 18 agencies relied on his guidance. That’s the very definition of a cover-up.

https://t.co/A66w7XeFgl

[Global Dissident @GlobalDiss]

🚨🇪🇺 EU wants INTERNET BY PASSPORT - and plans to block VPNs to enforce it.

“The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN.”

Their plan is totalitarian surveillance! 1984 is coming!

[Ada Lluch @AdaLluch]

Tyrant Starmer, we don’t believe you’re banning social media & VPNs for under-16s to ‘protect’ them.

If you truly cared about British kids, your government wouldn’t have allowed 250,000 girls be groomed by Pakistani gangs.

You don’t want the next generation knowing the truth.

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@TheRedbaiter Kids need educating, not censorship.
We all know this isn't about kid's safety, this is about controlling the internet, age verification and digital ID for all.

[Wide Awake Media @wideawake_media]

You don't seriously believe all these random Western countries just coincidentally decided to roll out under-16 social media bans at the exact same time—"to protect children"—without centralised supranational coordination by technocratic "elites" you never voted for, do you? 🙄

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@BigBrotherWatch The Australian kids are using AI to create fake images and add beards etc to bypass the weak security.
They are forced to break the rules to take part in life.

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@Suitandtie9999 They finally got around to releasing the warning about myocarditis in December 2021, after Rory Nairn's death was confirmed a vax death and after the education and health mandate deadline.
They also continued to spout that it was safe and effective.
#theyknew

[Matt Long @MattLon13470215]

@Suitandtie9999 The only way I knew about dangers from the mRNA shots were from "misinformation" on the Internet. I skipped the disinformation from the "Podium of Truth".

[Suit and tie @Suitandtie9999]

Outrageous Gaslighting.

Labour’s health spokesperson Aysha Verrall has boasted that “we ran one of the best public information programs on myocarditis in the world.”
Verrall then doubles down and says that the risks were made public and communicated clearly.

Her extraordinary claim is completely unsupported by any credible evidence, contradicted by official records, repeated implementation failures, and the total lack of independent scrutiny or benchmarking of her claim.

But what makes Verrall’s statement truly repugnant is that the known risks of myocarditis to teenagers appear to have been deliberately withheld from the public while the government aggressively rammed through its “Two Shots for Summer” campaign and pushed mass vaccination in schools.

To describe this as “one of the best in the world” is just delusional and a disgraceful insult to every affected family and a shocking abdication of basic honesty.

How on earth can she look at this failure and call it world-class?

Clip via @NZOFP

[Curious Kiwi @FitzieD]

@rosey_nz @chrishipkins Lets not forget that Adern also changed the consent laws for 12 years plus that year.

[Ro Edge @rosey_nz]

💣 HIPKINS CANNOT SURVIVE THIS!!!

New OIA papers suggest that @chrishipkins not only knew about the increased myocarditis risk of the Covid jab to youth as far back as 13 Aug 21, but at a meeting he chaired then the decision was taken to remove safety information about it from all official communications to the public.

And guess who else was at this meeting? @jacindaardern, Grant Robertson, @drayeshaverrall, @andrewlittle_nz and Ashley Bloomfield, @minhealthnz officials and Medsafe!

They ALL knowingly placed 285,000 children at risk, denying they and their parents full consent. Then to cover this up they ensured this meeting wasn’t minuted AND it was removed from their diaries.

As far as I’m concerned, they all belong in prison for risking our kids lives over a jab - but the biggest question for me is why? I don’t believe they would do this just to reduce vaccine hesitancy. There has to be more to it. It’s time for the public to know exactly what that @pfizer contract stated - and who gained from it.

Where is NZ’s MSM on this?
@nzherald @NewstalkZB @rnz_news @NZStuff @Breakfaston1

Well done uncovering what The Royal Commission and our entire MSM didn’t @KiwiAly!!!

https://t.co/68zslFpmAN

[Alex Armstrong @Alexarmstrong]

Very quiet today @SadiqKhan

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BREAKING: Slain 18YO white male Henry Nowak's father just WENT OFF, saying the killer stabbed his son and police did NOTHING despite his imminent death

"Henry told officers he could not breathe **9 times**." 😢

He says the police FAILED and refused to believe him. The killer is now jailed.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?! BARBARIAN.

"Henry was pulled across the gravel his hands forced behind his back and he was placed in handcuffs. Instead of being treated as a dying victim the police formally arrested Henry for assault and read in his rights. That was the last thing he heard."

"Henry had been stabbed multiple times and as his chest filled with blood he tried to escape. He was chased, abused and filmed...when police arrived Henry was lying on the floor fairly able to sit up and plainly in severe medical distress. With his final words he told officers that he could not breathe. He told them he had been stabbed."

"The police have said they were misled by the murderers and that the scene when they arrived was complex."

"Unfortunately it seems to us the truth is much simpler. The police were told by our son himself and by a member of the public...but the police did not believe that."

"As a family we will not let this go. No other family should experience the heartbreak and horror of losing a child to knife crime."

"Finally, I want Henry to know. We are so proud of him and we love him." 🙏🏻

[Together @Togetherdec]

UNDER 16s SOCIAL MEDIA 'BAN':

"75% of children have no compliance to Australia's 'ban'" - @ellymelly

You'd think this news would stop this in it's tracks for the UK - unless the aim is something else @uklabour?

[Tomek Niewęgłowski @tomek525]

Henry jest nieuzbrojony. Jest trzeźwy. Nie zrobił nic złego. Zostaje zaatakowany nożem przez Sikha, dźgnięty pięć razy. Woła, że jest ranny. Przybywa policja. Słuchają jego mordercy. Zakuwają go w kajdanki. Umiera w tych kajdankach, mówiąc im, że nie może oddychać.

"Wyobraź sobie, że premier nigdy nie wymawia jego imienia. Wyobraź sobie, że BBC nigdy nie domaga się filmu. Wyobraź sobie, że mija sześć miesięcy, a jedyna sprawiedliwość przyszła od obcych ludzi w internecie i w realu...

To jest kraj, w którym żył Henry Nowak: Wielka Brytania"

[Winston Peters @winstonpeters]

Because the PSA union leadership are card carrying members of the Labour Party.

Why the media continue with this facade of the PSA having any independence or credibility is frankly astounding.