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Paul Holmes interviews NZ Police Minister Judith Collins
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- Holmes: …You’re no longer innocent until you’re proven guilty. Collins: It’s fantastic, isn’t it? It’s the only thing we can do to deal with these people…
In this case, the relevant links are:
- Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act
- Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill
- Search and Surveillance Bill
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It gets worse. What stops the police from abusing the vast new powers National (and, to be fair, Labour – because this bill and the Search and Surveillance Bill are both Goff’s babies) has introduced? Apparently, the police are supposed to be concerned for their reputation, and afraid that they would “lose all credibility” if they victimised innocent people. Yeah, and I have a brewery in Mangitinoka to sell you. But Collins thinks we have other safeguards as well:
All these powers of the Police and other groups, they’re all subject to all sorts of controls around the judicial oversight, they’re also obviously subject to the Independent Police Complaints Authority. It’s very important though too to remember we have a free media in this country, it’s part of our democracy, so we don’t live in a country where the media can’t say what they think, in fact often do all sorts of things that some of us would rather they didn’t, but the fact is that we do and that is part of our democracy. We have an MMP system, which is also part of the democracy. We don’t live in a Police state, thank God.
Lets look at those one by one, shall we?
- Judicial oversight is rather difficult when judges don’t get a look in. The police need no warrant for example to seize DNA, while the bar to seize property is so low that the judiciary is reduced to a rubberstamp for the prejudices of the police force. Throw in a reverse onus of proof – guilty until proven innocent – and the idea that police abuses will be checked by the courts is simply a joke (that would require, for example, that their victims were able to afford lawyers – difficult when the police have just taken all your money).
- The Independent Police Conduct Authority simply isn’t. The police don’t take it seriously; why should we?
- While a free media is a theoretical check, that would require that they do their jobs, rather than simply relating court gossip and conducting softball interviews to retain “access”.
- As for MMP, National wants to get rid of it.
So much for “safeguards”.
Goldman’s Golden Five: What They Earned
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Apple says booting OS X makes an unauthorized copy
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Groklaw has an extensive look at the latest developments in the Psystar vs. Apple story. There’s a nice picture illustrating the accusation by Apple that Psystar makes three unauthorized copies of OS X. The most interesting however, is the last copy. From Apple’s brief: “Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or RAM.
I retain the copyright in this weblog posting.
When you read it you are making unauthorized copies:
-The network stack
-The browser’s page cache
-The browser’s doctree for this document
-In your retina
-In your visual cortex, and
-In your memory.There’s probably a reflection in your glasses as well, if you wear any.
Add one for text-to-speech…