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Hacker Disrupts New Zealand Election Campaign

Posted by samzenpus on from the throwing-a-wrench-in-the-works dept.

An anonymous reader writes New Zealand is facing its weirdest election ever with a hacker calling himself "Rawshark" progressively dumping emails hacked from a controversial blogger. This weekend, revelations forced the resignation of one Government minister and nobody knows what will drop next. Emails revealed that the blogger, called "Whale Oil", was in contact with both a government minister in charge of New Zealand's white collar crime investigations unit and with a PR man acting for a founder of a failed finance company then under investigation.

4 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Way to go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    We need alot of more this kind of hackers.
    They keep tabs on us, invade our privacy, no reason not to do the same to them.

    Hack the planet!

    1. Re: Way to go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's great to love your country and do things that show that love.

      I find that "showing love to a country" is a stupid thing to do...
      A country is an inanimate concept, it's not even a thing. It can't (and most definitely doesn't) love you back.
      Do you also show your love to a potato? What makes a country different than a potato or, say, a chair?

  2. Re:Alliteration fail :( by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    for a founder of a failed finance company then under investigation

    "for a founder of a failed finance firm then facing..." Can't make "investigation" work. Although that "V" might be close enough already. "Official fact-finding"? Doesn't really carry the same meaning.

    [Aside: The headline is misleading. It implies that a hack somehow interfered directly with the election mechanism. The hacker revealed corruption, it's the corruption which will disrupt the election chances of one of the major parties. "Hacked revelations threaten NZ National Party re-election bid". It's not like the hacker sabotaged a party's campaign site, or got into the ballot-printing or e-voting system. The difference between someone poisoning your company's products and someone revealing the poison your company puts in their products. In one case, they are the cause of the disruption, in the other they are just the messenger, you are the cause.]

    --
    Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
  3. Naive New Zealand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a NZer, though I live in London now. When I lived in Auckland, an American exchange student once described NZ as the country that is like America was before everyone got fucked over by someone else. It is so painfully is true. Our naive innocence is now being exploited by a bunch of international con artists (dotcom and john key) and we are just being take for a joy ride. Give us another five years of this and we'll all become a bunch of suspicious unfriendly people like the rest of the world.