Website mocks NZ Police

New Zealand Police will have to hope its United States counterparts are willing to help if it wants data about the Christchurch shooter removed from a website.

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.

He told Detective Senior Sergeant John Michael that the police 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’s privacy laws were more lax, which could help in this situation.

He said the website’s creator claim that New Zealand’s law would stop at the border was correct.

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, but it confirmed that it had contacted the website in relation to the terror attacks.

Spark is one of the internet providers that has blocked access to the 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.