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| Cops stuff up yet again...Nicky Hager wins. |
Our great protectors have done it again...broken the laws that they are meant to enforce. They illegally broke into a persons home, after giving false information to a Judge, and while there went through Nicky Hager's daughters underwear draw in their search for god knows what: It would appear that in the rush to appease the present government and especially the PM the Police will do whatever they are instructed to do without question. For it would seem that the law doesn't apply to them. This is a disgusting state of affairs and means that in real terms we are living in a unoffical dictatorship...if the police bosses simply do whatever the government asks them to do, or act illegally to please a hate blogger like Whale Oil [Cameron Slater] who has a very close relationship and contacts with the PM, as admitted by the PM] asks them to do...what hope is there for freedom...this from Matt Nippert of the NZ Herald.
Matt Nippert: Nicky Hager police raid ruling a win for
journalism
5:24 PM Thursday Dec 17, 2015
Nicky Hager surrounded by media at
the launch of his book, Dirty Politics in August 2014. above Photo / Mark Mitchell
"Nicky Hager's victory in the High Court today allows the
fourth estate - especially its burgeoning offshoots both new and old - to
breathe a sigh of relief.
Hager had claimed a police raid on his home last year - as
part of an investigation to unmask vigilante hacker Rawshark who was the main
source of blogger Cameron Slater's correspondence underpinning Hager's
sensational book Dirty Politics - was unlawful.
While declining to make a ruling on whether the police
investigation into the hack was deficient and could have been better progressed
searching places that weren't Hager's home, Justice Denis Clifford appears to
raise his eyebrow at the use of search warrants as fishing expeditions.
"I acknowledge some reasonable belief that they
[Police] would discover evidence of the Source's identity. My concern is that
reasonable belief, on the material I have been provided with, might better be
characterised as hope," he says.
Hager's
ultimately successful legal challenge was based on a
complaint that police, in going through his daughter's underwear drawer,
seizing more than a dozen storage devices, and turning his personal and
professional life upside down, had ignored Hager's important legal rights as a
journalist to protect his sources.
These rights are important to encourage a check on the
powers-that-be, enabling information that some may consider secret or
confidential to be aired if publishing or broadcasting is in the public
interest.
Having been in contact with Rawshark while working for the
Sunday Star-Times, and having reviewed much of the source material Hager used
in writing Dirty Politics, I'm satisfied conclusions he reached were both
accurate and newsworthy and definitely passed the public interest test.
At the nub of Hager's challenge was how far these rights of
journalistic privilege extended. Their applicability to mainstream media
sources, like this newspaper, has long been broadly accepted.
Police relations with traditional media, while occasionally
frosty (see the recent standoff with MediaWorks over Story's controversial
gun-buy) are usually cordial where search warrants are well-signalled and
privilege accepted.
In the case of Hager his legal team had claimed - and
Justice Clifford accepted - the Police had intentionally overlooked his
journalistic credentials in order to get a judge to sign off on the search
warrant.
In the warrant he was described as a "political
author," and any possibility that he may have privileges to assert - over
the identity of Rawshark or any other important stories he was working on - was
ignored.
In effect Police had begun from the assumption that because
Hager published his articles in book form and not a newspaper, and by himself
as an independent and not for a major news organisation, he did not measure up.
The dismissal of this argument, in effect granting new media
online and old media in book publishing the same ability as mainstream media
organisations to proudly carry the rights and responsibilities that the tag
'journalist'.
Ironically enough, in separate proceedings, the target of
Rawshark's hacking - Cameron Slater - is also engaged in arguments also trying
to extend journalistic privileges: to bloggers such as himself.
Today's ruling helpfully confirms that, where the public
interest test is met, authors - and bloggers - should all be entitled to wear
that badge".
You can read and listen to RNZ's report on the subject at:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/201783277/judge-rules-police-raid-illegal,-says-nicky-hager%27s-lawyer
