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."

Comments

I can tell from the pixels

[Valdrax]

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.

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

[hawguy]

20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus. Kim Lardass is full of shit.

Regardless of whether human response time is 10ms, 100ms or 1000ms, if you're able to respond to events on average 30ms faster than your competitor, you're going to beat them by an average of 30ms every time.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re: I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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 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.

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

[1s44c]

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.

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[1s44c]

If a for-profit entity offers you a service for free, you're not the customer -- you're the product.

Yeah, because a non-profit would never pull that? Riiiight.

Methinks you don't know how a non-profit works.

That's abductive reasoning. Just because for-profits don't always work in your interest doesn't mean that non-profits do.

Re: I can tell from the pixels

[1s44c]

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?

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[stewsters]

Or you know, he had a reported 20ms ping to the servers he played on, then he noticed that it jumped up to 50ms. Many multiplayer games list the pings of everyone connected.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

I get paid 50K a year to play videogames. Granted most of that goes towards internet and rent, its still preferable than to be washing cars, or working at walmart.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Anonymous Coward]

In a game the sum adds up and can be measured very well. If you didn't know it Leonardo Da Vinci was able to time things to about 1/10,000th second using sound and his ears. This is also beyond the sense of human capability but he used beat frequencies to difference it. In the case of a gamer you would notice in the Anti-Aliasing and the pixel detail. It is a differential is multiplicative in the pixels. In a modern game the pixels are sent without details in many cases subsequently having the display chip calculate the details. If the display chip is having to wait even 10ms or 30ms for a batch of pixels it will not be able to calculate in real time as much detail and will sacrafice it. I a game it will give grainy pictures.
In the mean time how about would the original poster please quit the attack on issues outside of the facts (Lard ass etc). You disclose either your insecurity or your interest. In the case of the former see a psycologist, In the case of the latter stop excusing your evil deeds against mankind by such attacks.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[K. S. Kyosuke]

20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus.

Except that nobody claims that those 20-30ms are anyone's reaction time. They do increase whatever reaction time you already have, though, and that's enough of a reason not to have them in the loop.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[jb11]

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[metrix007]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[pr0fessor]

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 broken windshield for almost two weeks after the storm that broke it. His car had only been fixed for a day when he made the complaint and I already had an appointment to get it repaired and he new very well how busy places where with all the hail damaged vehicles.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[viperidaenz]

or it is, and it's someones having fun at your expense

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Dunbal]

Or you have a friend who is googling pressure cookers. Or a friend of a friend, because they go "3 deep". Besides, the claim is that they are collecting and storing the information on absolutely everybody. But they don't actually "look" at it unless they "suspect" something.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[NatasRevol]

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

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[deaf.seven]

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 head, he shoots.
Now in an additional 20ms - 30ms the opponent can move to the side just enough so that the bullets flies past him without hitting.
You might also notice very small shitters in the opponents movement. That's probably because with a higher latency most people also get slightly more packet loss.

That's one of the biggest advantages of LAN parties, the gameplay simply feels fucking awesome compared to playing on the internet!

Re: I can tell from the pixels

[viperidaenz]

It wasn't even his mansion. He had fibre laid to his rented mansion.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[jb11]

Actually, it was a joke and reference to a line from Catch-22, but thanks for the response.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[NatasRevol]

I think the meme needs to be 'What agency is threatening you?'

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[dan828]

I was on a British Royal Navy base back in the 90s, and they had by far, the worst toilet paper I've ever seen in my life. It was sort of like the paper used to wrap meat in the US, but thinner, and it something along the lines of "property of the UK government" stamped all over it. To this day I've never experience toilet paper that bad. But all in all, it wouldn't surprise me that it regularly caused bleeding.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[cheater512]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[deadweight]

Wel if that was your other two career options, carry on!

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Kalriath]

Average ping to the US would be about 150ms-200ms.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[blackest_k]

sorry Izal the medicated toilet paper that given the choice of using it or a bit of newspaper the newspaper is preferable. Usually only ever found (and not in recent years) in public toilet facilities maintained by the local council. practically guaranteed not to be swiped from the facilities, it was that bad. If you took a sheet of grease proof paper and sprinkled detol or jeyes fluid on it, that would be close to Izal

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[styrotech]

There must be some sort of fine line between aggravating service members enough that they are tougher and fight harder, and going too far where they would rather opt for being a PoW so they could at least wipe their arse.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Dunbal]

Of course they are keeping content as well as metadata. Several documents leaked by Snowden are quite specific about it. As is the empirical evidence - man tweets a joke about having a blast in LA, is stopped at the border the next day and sent back home because of it. Within 24 hours they had identified him, tracked him down to a certain flight schedule and flagged him. Or the pressure cooker/backpack incident, which I think the story about his work "reporting him" being some BS damage control. Hey when you can murder people around the world with drones with impunity, who's going to stop you snooping around in their IP packets?

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[gstoddart]

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 if you accede to constant state surveillance.

Because, if you ever decide to have an affair, or run against an incumbent, or try to prove government wrong-doing, or follow a religion the state disapproves of, or organize a gathering of an unpopular political party, discuss something controversial, or seriously ponder taking action against an unjust government ... you're totally screwed.

Think China and trying to talk about Tiananmen Square. Think the Soviet Gulags. Think of some of the nastier dictators who just drag people off in the night and shoot them.

If someone can dredge through your entire private life and discredit, inconvenience, arrest, or otherwise intimidate you or fuck with your life -- you cease to live in a free society. Because they will either police the crap out of everyone, and make it into a really nasty place to live -- or they will selectively police the crap out of everyone, and make it into a really nasty place to live.

If your face looks like everyone else then its just noise like everything else. If all your activity's are hidden in encrypted containers and on the dark web, they cant spy on that if you are smart and do simple things like disable javascript and encrypt your shit with strong passwords.

So, you're saying that if you're generic enough looking, smart enough to outsmart the security people, you deserve privacy, but everyone else should do without?

I'm sorry, but you sound like you haven't got the barest clue about why people object to the spying in the first place, let alone the problems that come along with the widespread surveillance of a society. When your government knows everything you do, your options are far more circumscribed.

If you think people should be giving up rights so that governments can prop up the illusion of security -- well, you deserve neither, to paraphrase.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[dan828]

Thanks for telling me the brand. Honestly, I've been talking about the hideous stuff for over twenty years now. My one encounter with it made such an impression I've never been able to forget it. As much for it's government branding every half inch, as it's unsuitability for it's intended purpose. It didn't help that it was an emergency situation the morning after a night of heavy drinking.

Re:I can tell from the pixels

[MarkTina]

Oooh I remember that stuff in school! Fecking awful! It just moved "stuff" about on your arse, you'd have more luck (and fun) wiping clean by dragging your bum across the floor!

John Key walking out when questioned about spying

[schneidafunk]

This was also in the news: Prime minister walks out after being questioned by reporters

Protest all you want

[fustakrakich]

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.

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:Protest all you want

[Seumas]

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.

Re:Protest all you want

[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 stupid people use to vote for people.

If you don't believe this is true, please find me an example where a population has reversed its government's policy via a vote. That happens by revolution, and the shedding of blood. It doesn't matter if the country was a dictatorship or a "democracy".

Re:Protest all you want

[kilfarsnar]

This has gotten a long way beyond the control of the elected officials. Mess with the dark government and you get a limo ride through Dealey Plaza.

People will call you a tinfoil hatter because they don't want to think the world is run that way. But you're right, it is.

Re:Protest all you want

[fustakrakich]

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 that if you want to see any progress at all. Try testing the system before crying about it being broken. And understand the foibles of majority rule.

Re:Protest all you want

[fustakrakich]

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

Re:Protest all you want

[suutar]

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.

Re:Protest all you want

[fustakrakich]

Yes, the change does indeed have to come from within. There is no other way.

Coordinated

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Coordinated

[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 main interchanges. It's when traffic hops from one provider to the next, sometimes in the same building, where the so called "buffer bloat" hits the most.

You also notice it on Quakelive.com. One set of servers used to be about 40ms ping. Now it is up to 70ms, all because traffic has to cross the border to the US. 1000km extra distance to Toronto is now lower ping. Maybe buffer blot is directional too?

Re:Coordinated

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that the following are flagged as "Suspected NSA listening facility in the city

Just FYI, you won't see the sniffers on a traceroute. There are generally two ways of installing data captures on high-capacity backbones, which method is used depends on the ISP.
The first method is to use a Sandvine or something similar in between two routers. You won't see any indication that the traffic did not go directly from the first router to the next, other than a slight latency increase. If it's adding 20 -30 ms then they are horribly overloading the sniffer, it should add less than 1ms doing full DPI if you're running it right.
The other method is to mirror a port on a router/switch. In this case you also won't ever see anything, and should not even see latency increases unless they are overloading the backplane or CPU on the switch/router.

Again, you will NOT see them on a traceroute. So the list on that site shows, at best, facilities where there's a router which might handoff to a sniffer. But it's not something you can determine via ping times.

In regards to the story, it sounds to me like someone changed the routing on his dedicated circuit to possibly add in a sniffer... and they didn't know WTF they were doing. But it's also possible his routing/circuit path changed for other reasons, and he's just extra paranoid about having his traffic monitored. But to respond to several posts calling bullshit on his ping time detection- you're completely wrong. When you're paying for dedicated fiber with a tight SLA, you damn well pay attention to your latency because you're paying out the ass for that circuit and if your ISP slips outside the SLA you want every last cent of credit/penalty in the contract.

Re:Coordinated

[kilfarsnar]

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. We also know that the intelligence agencies are close to the Elite; they recruit at Ivy League schools, use large businesses as cover, carry out operations to further business interests, etc. So the mechanisms and systems required for such coordination exist. Might it be a surprise if such coordination were not going on?

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand the point you are making, but it's not just one instant that is 20-30ms off, it's everything. You get used to the latency in gaming, and a change is enough to be noticed. Also, if you had a 50ms ping to something, that might be considered OK, where as 80ms might be considered slow. It's enough be a threshold.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't know if he noticed it, or the system measured and displayed it(which is common enough for multiplayer matchmaking software to do, and requires no special skills); but if you live in New Zealand your ping to just about anything other than Middle Earth is going to suck.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he's playing a game that shows your ping time on the screen.

Way back when I was in college I ran an FTP site from my dorm. The college decided to start watching what I was doing by redirecting all my traffic through a separate hop. I lost internet for about a minute, and when it came back my quake ping had gone from sub-100ms to over it. Only took a few ms to figure out what was going on.

Eighty Nine Percent....

[Hairy1]

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?

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[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.

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[hacker]

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?

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[kilfarsnar]

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.

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[Dan667]

the US survived mccartyism when public support turned against it. Same thing is happening now.

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[flibbajobber]

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.

Re:Eighty Nine Percent....

[dryeo]

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.

Well I'd notice

[goldcd]

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.

Numbers

[istartedi]

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

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Gadget_Guy]

You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?

Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.

About time...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[1s44c]

He runs servers. People who run servers often have some idea of the ping time to them. I know the ping time to my servers from home even though I can't react at super-human speeds, catch bullets in my teeth, fire lasers from my eyes, or anything of that nature.

Race based Slavery

[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 think of it as raindrops coming together in forming a puddle. Nobody told the raindrops what to do, it was just in their nature to run downhill and amassing at the lowest point.

Re:Race based Slavery

[Dunbal]

The "force" is simple to understand. The tighter I tighten the screws, the more I can steal and get away with. That's what power is about. Doing what you want even when other people don't want you to do it. If you have power, they just can't stop you.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Nadaka]

I can definitely tell the difference of 20ms to 30ms ping when playing an FPS like counterstrike or tactical ops that doesn't perform latency gimping. Its huge, and makes all the difference in the world if your base ping is under 100. Above 100ms, its not even worth playing anyway. Way to slow.

Oh...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

See?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Protests mounting!

[viperidaenz]

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.

Re:Protests mounting!

[Flere Imsaho]

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

Re:Protests mounting!

[viperidaenz]

What are you on about?
I said it was the asset sales protesters who desecrated the war memorial.

Re:they're protesting the wrong way

[Dunbal]

Especially when you start rounding up the people with signs and throwing them in jail for not being in a "free speech zone" or for being within 1 mile of a secret service officer.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[morgauxo]

If he were staring directly at the stream of ones and zeros coming in through his modem like a bad scene out of a Matrix movie you might have a point. Instead the actions and reactions he observes in his game would each have been the product of many pieces of data coming through his connection. The cumulative effect could be many times greater than the 20-30 ms that any one packet is slowed by. If for example it takes 50 pieces of information to update his display and each is taking an extra 20ms he is going to see a 1 second delay. That's probably a bit of an exageration from how his games actually worked but it makes the math easy. The point is a 20-30ms delay could easily result in much more than that of an actual in-game lag.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Shoten]

I can't believe people are actually taking Kim Dotcom's statement without oh, a pound of salt.

Let me translate:
"As soon as I noticed that it could be something I could talk about to get my name on the news again, I noticed I was being spied on."

Re:they're protesting the wrong way

[kermidge]

"If everyone united and attached bogus terroristic jargon to all their emails...."

You first.

Yeah, I know, I know. It's Monday, close of biz, and I'm retired anyway. I couldn't resist.

In the U.S. marching around and yelling with signs (is that large print? [ducks]) is not allowed; we're now constrained to pre-approved and designated free-speech zones. Any yelling or marching within the zone is classified as a riot and subject to violent dismissal. Oh, and three or more people gathered can be labeled a mob, thus riot. Be seeing you.

But but but.... we have nothing to fear right?

[ernest.cunningham]

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 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

But this is much bigger than our right to privacy. It is the slow erosion of our basic human rights until we get to the point where we have no rights left. People need to stop making excuses for this erosion and stop being enablers of these changers through their misguided politically biased discourse. We need to put politics aside and discuss these issues in an apolitical (absence of political bias) manner.

"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" is a myth that is built on false assumptions.

There are too many questions to be answered. What about continuity of oversight:
The data collected will outlive the people who voted for it, the people who drafted the bill, the people in charge of the GCSB at the time of inception and the corporates who support it. Even if we could assume that right now, the govt. and corps. have our absolute wellbeing at heart and their minds are devoid of corrupt thoughts of misuse, there is little guarantee that these values will be shared by their successors in the years to come.

What about data control? Those who share the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" mentality think their information is being stored in some secure government department under lock and key. Well, your data is being shared amongst the international spy partners. This information will also be available to other organisations such as the police. Once this data has left the GCSB data centres they no longer have control of it. So your information could be constanty changing hands and could eventually become public and available to the private sector. Sooner or later your personal data will leak.

In a perfect world we would think that our spy agencies will only have our best interests at heart, will not abuse their power and privileges. We would think the data systems will be 100% accurate and reliable, that information is used in accordance with the original consent purpose. That all procedural processes will be followed and that ethics will always be at the forefront when deciding when to use this data.

Any person can look back and see that this perfect state can never be achieved.

I repeat, we need to put politics aside and discuss these issues in an apolitical (absence of political bias) manner.
We need to have those from all corners of this country reviewing the legislative changes and the existing legislation and work out the best way our national security can be preserved with the least intrusion into out private lives.

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[Nyder]

You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?

Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.

Actually we can know what he meant, because he has stated it before.

https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcoms-gaming-lag-hints-spying-121004/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10838484
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/10/06/1723231/kim-dotcom-apparently-spied-on-for-longer-than-admitted

I was there last night: Inspiring and infuriating

[Anonymous Coward]

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: Only those participated in that poll who were interested in the subject.

The audacity by our prime minister in "justifying" this bill is utterly outrageous: He dares to say on national TV that this will just be like Norton Anti-Virus for the Internet, only monitoring (and filtering!) for a few hundred milliseconds and only for sites with a warrant! That sentence makes no sense at all, it's not at all what the proposed law says, and in general it's such a lame-ass excuse. He just shruggs it off. Either painfully or willfully ignorant this man. You decide.

So, our "free" society goes to pot. Currently, New Zealand is rated as one of the freest societies in the world. So much for that. The majority of the population just can't be bothered, is too easily mislead, believes the slick charm of the PM... nothing's going to happen. His popularity rating is completely untouched by all of this.

And so, as usual, bad things happen when good people do nothing.

Re:I was there last night: Inspiring and infuriati

[geezer nerd]

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.

SSL Interception

[Flere Imsaho]

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 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 reminding myself that HTTPS isn't secure because the CAs can't be trusted

I wonder who's doing the MitM? Our ISP, Orcon? The gubbermint? Google? The NSA? Aliens?

Why are tax payers paying to be spied on?

[3seas]

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?
 

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[readingaccount]

People who run servers often have some idea of the ping time to them. I know the ping time to my servers from home even though I can't react at super-human speeds, catch bullets in my teeth, fire lasers from my eyes, or anything of that nature.

Wait... you can't do those things? And you call yourself a system admin? Tisk, tisk, tisk,

Re:20-30 ms is massive

[hazeii]

Easy to tell if you run NTP (pretty much certain if you have servers). For example, take a look at the image here - you can clearly see the effect of route changes to remote servers.