Hacker Disrupts New Zealand Election Campaign

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.

Voip SMS Fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

The Whale Oil blogger was also involved in revealing a sex scandal involving the PM trying to remove a Mayor. Threatening text messages where sent and the NZ Herald newspaper put out a public appeal to unearth the sender. It turns out that the Caller ID was one of the free international Voip SMS local forwarding numbers that had for years been diverted by the local Telecom in their attempt to frustrate its users. When this Voip SMS connection was made known to the newspaper, details of how to crack the exchange were picked up by the Intelligence Services and within hours the anonymous Caller ID hole which Whale Oil had been using was plugged.

His full name is Whale Oil Beef Hooked

[Anonymous Coward]

But you have to pronounce it really fast

Assange to help Kim Dotcom drop bombshell on PM

[twosat]

As if Prime Minister John Key does not have enough problems, Kim Dotcom has revealed that he will drop a bombshell on him. He is warning that something big will come out on September 15, just five days from the election. He says WikiLeaks founder and fugitive Julian Assange, who's holed up in Ecuador's London embassy, is set to take part in a pre-election attack on John Key. The addition of Mr Assange confirms the event will be about New Zealand's spying.

http://tvnz.co.nz/vote-2014-ne... [tvnz.co.nz]

Naive New Zealand

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Left wing hitjob

[Hairy1]

Nice way of trying to turn this around. What this has done is expose how these National politicians have gone beyond the normal politics in New Zealand to actually support muck raking and character assasination. It is the kind of politics New Zealanders hate. You see while it isn't perfect we still have a functional democracy, unlike the United States. This 'attack' would have had no impact if the Government had not done anything wrong, but clearly they have. There is now clear evidence of a corporation buying off favour to slander a senior investigator with the cooperation of a senior Minister. The senior Minister appears to have oiled the wheels to get previously restricted information released under the Official Information Act in order to harm a political opponent. Reminds me of the saying - live by the sword, die by the sword.

Re:Naive New Zealand

[Jack Griffin]

I have a theory on this. Why is it that countries like NZ and Iceland etc are nice and friendly while others are angry and hostile. Two key components, size and isolation. Being small means you are always manageable and less prone to corruption (yeah it's still there, but at a far smaller scale as to not be an major issue). Being small also means everyone knows each other, so it's harder to be a jerk when your decision directly affect people you actually know. Isolation creates the benefit of not having every Tom, Dick or Mohammed coming through the place trying to take pieces of it. It offers no strategic value so all the jerks focus on bigger targets, leaving you with only lightweight jerks. Neither of these things are going to change in the short or medium term, so I wouldn't worry too much. One outcome of this idea, is that along the lines of the Monkeysphere theory, maybe countries like the US and China are too big? Maybe the best path for humanity is smaller countries and/or states? Corruption seems to be a function of size, so if the world was divided into NZ/Iceland type chunks would we all be better off?