Pirate Party of NZ announces plan to sue The Civilian for defamation, soon… once we can afford Chapman Tripp.

We are shocked and appalled to see The Civilian with its long and distinguished history of honourable factual reporting to have fallen to the lows of incorrectly quoting our dear President.

Obviously our first response to this outrageous error (after we’d caught our breath from laughing) was to say “Hey, Clint! Should we sue the Civilian for defamation?”. He advised as we’re a party of limited means we should make enquires with Colin Craig about pooling our resources for taking further legal action.

Expect to hear more from Colin Craig’s lawyer soon about us, but if that doesn’t work out with Colin Craig then you’ll be hearing from our own Chapman Tripp lawyers in about 50 years time when we have saved up enough to afford an hour of their time. Although maybe we’ll be able to afford it sooner if we stop drinking so much wine at Heritage Hanmer Springs with PPNZ funds.

If you want to save us ^H^H you this legal trouble we happy to settle right now out of court for a couple more boxes of wine of suitable quality that matches our status of being very important politicians!

Hey, Clint! Should we sue the Civilian for defamation?

Cyber Bullying needs our Attention

In the last decade or so, it seems that bullying has taken a new and very disturbing change of face. We acknowledge that this is, in fact, due to the lack of face and to the anonymity that the internet and cell phones provide. Bullying has become something that is done behind closed doors. With the lack of a true identity, harassment has become so much easier and even more tempting, and hence, the extremity of the harassment has increased tenfold. This may be due to the fact that the person bullying does not see any reaction from the victim, and thus, development of any empathy towards the victim is incredibly difficult.

Bullying is an asymmetric power relationship, or an imbalance of strength. In the school playground, this can be seen as the bigger kid picking on the smaller one for their lunch; online, it is very similar. Bullies are able to create numerous accounts on any website, and therefore create many different identities to use in bullying their victim. This leaves the victim feeling hopeless, because, from their point of view, many different people are bullying them – in reality it may only be one person. Most websites have features for the prevention of bullying, such as the ability to accept or decline any friend request, and the ability to block or report any page or user. Unfortunately, most users do not know how to do the latter. Another technique used for harassment is using a facebook page solely to name and shame others or to target a specific person. This is much harder to deal with as the target can block the page, but this only prevents them from seeing the offensive content. These pages start up rumours which will affect the victim throughout their daily life, not just online.

It is very easy to blame the technology itself and say that cyber-bullying happens because of the power that anonymity allows. A core reason for this is that it is very difficult for parents to believe that their children do such things to each other. We see it as a problem with people – we have been dealing with bullying for a long time, now it has simply changed its face. No longer will traditional anti-bullying education have any effect. We need to set up a well-thought out education system in which every child and parent knows what can happen online and how to prevent cyber-bullying and how to stop it when it happens. It will be more beneficial to create a new system in which each member of a community has the ability to moderate any interactions within the community. This will empower the members of the community and ensure that the bystander has the ability to speak out and to really make a difference. It will also ensure quick and efficient moderation that is in-line with self-defined community standards, in contrast to the current system in which we rely on the moderators of a site, whose job may be very difficult if they receive more reports per day than they are able to attend to.

The use of data communications today has more uses for good than bad. To introduce laws that will hinder the users’ ability to share information through this medium restricts speech without addressing the issues and the ramifications will be endless. We need a shift in the cultural mindset towards cyberbullying, and not let it become another means in which our ability to communicate is controlled and normalized through legislation aimed at punitive reaction for stepping outside boundaries.

Novopay the latest in a long string of ‘predictable’ disasters

The Pirate Party of NZ is calling for an independent evaluation into the management and performance of the Ministry of Education during the Novopay failure and also an enquiry into the tender process which led to Talent2 developing Novopay.

Pirate Party Secretary Camille Cowley “We’re very concerned and wish to see this matter dealt with as quickly as possible. We’re very supportive of The Principals’ Federation call for an urgent review to take place sooner than the Ministry of Education one scheduled for April. The Party also sees the need for transparency surrounding Talent2′s acquisition of the contract, including the fact they are an offshore company when many NZ companies certainly have the capacity and expertise to complete a project of this scale and importance. Given the outcomes of these enquiries, accountability can be fairly judged whether it is a failure of the provider or of the government department managing the project.”

Pirate Party President Daniel Bertinshaw “There are very clear failures apparent in the Novopay debacle and expecting the schools to pay out of their own budgets with no offer of reimbursement is one of the worst. Not looking at a staged introduction and instead rolling it out across the entire country as some sort of faulty nationwide beta is another. Assuming that a project will be delivered and work is mistake #1 in IT software requisitioning”

While the new issues with Novopay that have continued into 2013 are giving schools more headaches and costs to deal with, failure of Government IT projects is nothing new to NZ’s Parliament and many saw this day coming. With a large focus recently on the series of blunders and breaches under the National Government, the ACC and Corrections leaks and the WINZ kiosks brought to light by Keith Ng, experts and laymen alike are calling information infrastructure at a national government level extremely poor.

After the cavalcade of IT disasters New Zealanders have witnessed under this administration, The Pirate Party of NZ is calling into question the competency of the NZ Government in dealing with any IT project, industry regulation and IT legislation and is heralding a call to arms for a party that understands the technical needs and social implications of the Internet and IT.

With some views being espoused that Novopay’s errors are within acceptable error rates (industry wide) making this a non-issue, the government needs to be told that this is not only widely unacceptable, it is a catastrophe. They are also misleading the public around acceptable error rates in a very damaging way. The Ministry of Education has also admitted recently that it isn’t aware of all the new problems schools are having, leaving the parents, teachers and the public to wonder what sort of oversight they have over their Ministry and its functions at all.

The Commerce Commission has ruled that wholesale broadband prices should be cheaper. Such a move would go some way in bringing our pricing closer in line with other OECD countries. Our Government has acted against the Commission’s ruling and has gone against the 2011 Amendments to the Telecommunications Act which it passed into law.

John Key has stated that overriding the Commission is needed to protect Chorus’s profit margins and its ability to deliver broadband and the UltraFast Broadband rollout. It would seem  Chorus’s profit margins have been hamstringing the development of NZ’s internet to a larger extent than already thought.

Insiders from Chorus subsidiary contractors have informed the Pirate Party that there has been massive issues with the UltraFast Broadband rollout with Chorus underpaying regional contracted businesses allowing them not enough time to complete jobs and payments being based on minimal possible time to complete jobs. Technicians are having issues and some regional contractors are finding the UFB contract is not the golden goose it once seemed.

The problems with Chorus, the UFB rollout and the Government’s handling of the project from tender to today seem to be systemic and nothing looks set to change in the near future as the UFB rollout continues to drag on. From something the National Party campaigned on 5 years ago, to something which many kiwis still have no access to today, it is such  shame that a core infrastructure project like this could have been handled so badly. A lot of NZ’ers are not aware of the benefits of UFB and the Government has done little to educate them on the importance of the uptake of the service.

Pirate Party President Daniel Bertinshaw said today “As internet users in NZ we have been paying too  much for too little for far too long and the ruling by the Commission recognised that. To put the profits of a private company before the citizens and other businesses of NZ seems short sighted and will have far reaching adverse effects on the way we use the internet and peoples capacity to do so.”

It is not without sadness that the Pirate Party of New Zealand looks at the currently elected MP’s of this fair country and wonders how the people could not be served better by someone that knew what they were doing and had the peoples best interests at heart. To the Internet! Supporters of this message spread the word, it’s time for someone who knows what they’re doing!

The Pirate Party of New Zealand

ENDS

The Pirate Party of NZ welcomes Rick Shera’s addition to the Dotcom legal team

Rick Shera is an international thought leader in technology law and plays an integral part in the digital fabric of New Zealand. As a Chair of Netsafe, Director of the Network for Learning, and legal expert on copyright, online liability, jurisdiction, crimes and privacy, having Mr Shera involved in one of this decades most critical legal battles here in NZ is reassuring. Whilst this case is being watched from around the world, it is us kiwis that have the highest stake in its outcome.

The issues which the case has brought to the forefront of the media, and the actions of the NZ and US government, effect every New Zealander. Issues of privacy, transparency, accountability, data safety and due process are things which the Government should be upholding, instead we see them doing the opposite. These are issues for us, they are issues for you and they are certainly part of the battleground which Kim Dotcom’s legal team is upping their K/D ratio from.

We wish Kim Dotcom and his legal team all the best, and with a world class kiwi at their side, we know they won’t need it.

The Pirate Party of New Zealand
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ENDS

– PRESS RELEASE – IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Pirate Party takes issue with Piratical new Pro-TPP Website

The Pirate Party of New Zealand is concerned and has complained over the contents of the tradeworks.org.nz website.  The website has ostensibly been set up by the few organisations that think they stand to gain from the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, and has used  imagery and text which impinges on the intellectual property of the Pirate Party and its International organization.

The use of a masted sailing ship is the most glaring example of the satirical nature of this website and one of our main grounds  for offence. The Pirate Ship and all its related depictions are clearly intellectual property of the Pirate Party or at least if not the Party then The Pirate Bay which the Party shares a mutual affinity with for a free and open internet. In these heady days of lawsuits over patents  for rounded corners we can not stand by on the decks of the internet and allow these cannon shots to go unanswered!

Furthermore as a political party, it is up to us and other political parties to make blusterous calls about ‘more jobs’. These are well  known trademark statements from politicians. Were the statements supplied displayed with the factual basis for their existence we  would be happy to let this pass, unfortunately with no solid evidence, the ‘more jobs’ claim can only legally be made by politicians.  The Advertising Standards Authority clearly states that only politicians and their parties are allowed to advertise ‘More Jobs’ and then  not deliver and have no plan for doing so. We see the Tradeworks website and by extension, its creators, the TPP negotiators, as  breaching NZ’s advertising standards.

The section on ‘Myths about TPP’ (sic) then goes on to display peoples fears about the agreement but the accompanying text does  nothing to dispel the ‘myths’. This sort of wishy washy policy is once again the hallmark intellectual property of politicians. The page  also shows a man flying with a jetpack, no information has been released (at all about anything really) about these jetpacks and how  people will receive them.

Due to the unwarranted secrecy and lack of any real explanation of anything, and the use of Pirate Ships and happy brightly coloured  cartoonish design, we demand the site be taken down, or at least filled with real relevant information OR made to look more like the  websites of the businesses supporting it, which we have figured out are anything to do with meat, beef, lamb, dairy, other types of meat  and wood.

This press release may be more ludicrous than the TPP itself, but we won’t know until it’s too late.  ‘May satire rule the high seas and help defeat the TPP!’

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ENDS

After Martin Niemöller

As famous Computer Scientist Daniel J. Bernstein (who shares my first name, initials, and penchants for being difficult and dressing in black) famously observed: “I’m not interested in security through obscurity. I want real security mechanisms, solutions that work for _everybody_.”  Given that the citizen data is hidden by mere obscurity, one imagines easily that typical “lowest bidder” outsourcing or in-house incompetence was the order of the day for this project.  It’s easy for me to sit in the peanut gallery and boo at this mistakes, because managing the information infrastructure of an entire country is hard.  Even ones as small as New Zealand, because in general the complexity of government scales horizontally, and vertical scaling with population is easy; what that means is that the number of functions required for 4.5 million people is the same as the number of functions required for the 22 million over the other side of the Tasman.  But the very fact that it’s hard shows a misapprehension about it in the halls of the beehive.

In system and network design it’s a truism that security cannot be added afterwards: it needs to a fundamental, first-class part of the design.  This is also true of privacy in content sharing systems (I’m going to avoid “social blah blah” terminology), Google Plus being an example of it being designed “privacy ahead” and Facebook being a good example of privacy as an afterthought, though in Facebook’s defence, many of the issues are user education.  Client privacy on systems like Facebook is not as important as that of the Tax Department, ACC, MSD or any other government department.  If you accidentally share a drunken photo on facebook, you may suffer reputation damage, but if your fraud investigation goes public, the damage is significantly more.  So government departments really need to address this front on, but it runs deeper.

ICT, or more accurately or national information infrastructure: both the hardware layer, the data formats and the metadata registries, need to built properly the first time.  We don’t have one yet.  We have a patchwork of different systems, and no fabric to unify them.  To meet the challenges of the coming century we need to move beyond this idea that ICT is something that you tack on the side of an institution.  It needs to be treated as the fabric upon which the different departments of the public service interact, and interact with the population, and even private enterprise.  And when (not if) this is done privacy and security need to be primary concerns to start with.

This may sound like “building the house and then the foundations”, there are example of this, in particular Amazon moving its entire infrastructure to services allowed it to become a huge IaaS provider, after Jeff Bezos just declared it was services only.  The cost of any institution can be reduced by effective integrations, in fact research by Dr Robert Amor at the University of Auckland has estimated that the costs of the construction industry can be reduced by 10 million a year.   Investing in this sector would develop a large sector for IT in New Zealand, using high quality enterprise grade software, and save the long term costs of the cowboy IT systems that have been slapped in place so far, and if designed correctly would allow for horizontal scaling, avoiding the inevitable high cost of maintaining disparate and dodgy systems (and probably poorly documented too).

Lastly, it appalls me as an internaut and software developer that Government is legislating The Internet, rather than Government legislating government to use the internet.  Maybe, just maybe, little old New Zealand can become a shining example to the world by having an actually efficient public service.

Thank you to those who arrived and helped out on the night. Cheers to the Pirate Party of New Zealand and all involved.