It simply astounds me that the Police have once again abused their power by illegally searching somebody who reported on the Dirty Politics saga. This time it’s blogger Bomber Bradbury, who has had his bank accounts riffled through for information on the hacker Rawshark.Not only did the Police harass Bomber by unlawfully gaining access to information because of their deluded hunch, the banks have also acted incorrectly by allowing that unlawful access to cause a reduction in the bloggers credit rating.
Today, the NZ Herald reported:
Hunt for Rawshark sees police rapped again for 'unlawful' search of banking records
Police have again been caught unlawfully harvesting private banking information in the search for the hacker behind the Dirty Politics book.
This time it is activist and journalist Martyn Bradbury who has been drawn into the police investigation.
And this time police inquiries are said to have had an awful impact, leading to two suicidal episodes.
There is clearly a case for damages here.
Bradbury told the NZ Herald he uncovered the police probe after being rejected for credit by his bank.
He said he became suspicious because the "extensions of credit weren't extravagant and the manner in which the declines occurred just seemed odd".
When Bradbury sought information through the Privacy Act, he discovered that detectives working on the Rawshark case had made a request for his records saying they were investigating "computer fraud".
Detectives did so quoting a section of the Privacy Act allowing those holding data to ignore people's privacy if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe it would help "maintenance of the law".
Help the maintenance of law? Help the National party and their attack blogger Cameron Slater more like... by impeding the finances of one of their strongest critics.
The stupid thing here is that Rawshark had stated, and there's no reason to not believe them, that they undertook the hack on Slater because he had attacked one of their friends.
This narrows it down to around a million people, so why the Police singled out Bomber in this instance is particularly questionable.
The ruling from Privacy Commissioner John Edwards found police gave Bradbury's bank no information to make an assessment of whether the request was "reasonable".
Edwards rejected police submissions that the request only lacked supporting information for the bank to make a proper decision.
Even if police had provided the information, Edwards said detectives "were not justified" in asking for the banking records without a legal order from a judge.
That’s why a claim would be successful. So if there are any lawyers out there who would like to provide Bomber with their legal services and do the New Zealand justice system a favour by ensuring this type of corrupt policing doesn’t occur again, why not put your hands up?
