Website operator mocks NZ police
New Zealand Police will have to hope their United States counterparts are willing to help if they want data about the Christchurch shooter from a website.
Joshua Moon, the creator of the website that Stuff has decided not to name, has refused to hand over posts and video links that were reportedly put on his site as the attack happened.
Moon told Detective Senior Sergeant John Michael that his request was a ‘‘joke’’ and New Zealand was a ‘‘small, irrelevant island nation’’ and a ‘‘s...hole country’’.
Gehan Gunasekara, an associate professor of commercial law in the Auckland University Business School, said it was a difficult situation.
Because the website was not hosted in New Zealand, police had little power over it.
Police could possibly access information forensically by looking at cached material, he said, but it was hard to compel an overseas site to comply with New Zealand requirements.
‘‘If it doesn’t happen voluntarily the only way would be through a mutual assistance agreement with United States law enforcement authorities.’’
He said the US had more lax privacy laws, which could help in this situation.
He said Moon was right with his claim that New Zealand’s law would stop at the border.
Gunasekara said he hoped police could get assistance from the US and ‘‘serve a lesson on these people’’ so they realised they were not completely beyond the law.
Police would not say whether it was working with the FBI or pursuing its request for the site to hand over information about its users.
‘‘In regard to your request I can confirm New Zealand Police made contact with the website as part of the ongoing investigation into the Christchurch terror attacks.’’
Spark is one of the internet providers that has blocked access to Moon’s website.
But Council for Civil Liberties spokesman Thomas Beagle said Spark’s approach of blocking the entire website was a ‘‘blunt instrument approach’’ which raised issues about censorship and freedom of speech.
‘‘While these sites are hotbeds of unpleasant online behaviour, they’re also used for a number of other things.
‘‘And the unpleasant behaviour is not actually illegal, it’s unpleasant,’’ Beagle said.
He said users of websites like Moon’s also used them as a platform to socialise and say what they wanted without censorship.
Beagle said preventing the spread of such content was a complex issue which governments around the world were grappling with.