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, which Stuff has decided not to name, has refused to hand over posts and video links that were reportedly uploaded to his site as the attack happened.
He 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.
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 they were working with the FBI or pursuing their request for the site to hand over information about its users.
They would only say they contacted the website as part of the investigation.
Spark is among internet providers to have 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.’’
Preventing the spread of such content was a complex issue which governments around the world were grappling with, Beagle said.