Nothing personal
Thursday, February 16, 2012
MNew Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister has himself endured a broadly similar invasion, albeit from a source arguably less malevolent, and certainly less salacious, in its intent. emo Heather Mills, Hugh Grant, Jude Law, J. K. Rowling et al: Murray Mccully feels your pain. Faintly. The celebrities had their private communications hacked, by the media underbelly. They were wronged, their private lives invaded, and have since had the chance to give testimonies of compelling reproach and recrimination to a parliamentary inquiry.
Last April the hackers collective Anonymous broke into Mr Mccully’s Telecom Xtra account and accessed private emails which, come to think of it, he shouldn’t have instructed his office to forward to his personal account. It turns out the appeal of this move – it made the information so much easier to get at – applied to hackers as well.
Unlike the UK phone tappers, the Anonymous crew appear, so far anyway, to have contented themselves with mild mischief of an embarrassing rather than damaging sort.
Nobody much is rushing to console the minister. Rather, he has faced a prime ministerial scolding, although he contends Cabinet papers and cable traffic from foreign posts were not sent to the account, he has been held up as a casestudy warning to other ministers to be more careful about airily sidestepping the protected channels of communication.
Well, we say protected. We live in an age where any emphatic expectations of privacy protection are becoming illusory. Mr Mccully should have known better than to make it quite that easy for his hackers, but the Anonymous fraternity have scaled more ostensibly secure walls than this.
In New Zealand it attacked the Internal Affairs website following the implementation of internet filtering, and then after the arrest of Kim Dotcom last month it hacked overseas government websites, including the United States Justice Department. And just lately, Anonymous posted a telephone conversation of London’s Metropolitan Police and the FBI on a conference call discussing investigation progress into several suspected Anonymous members. That’s not embarrassing. That’s humiliating.
Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman Phil Goff says the Mccully hacking is a wakup call that email correspondence sent to private addresses is not confidential. On the facts of this incident, he’s correct. In the wider context, the rest of us needn’t be too smug or censorious unless we are already being extremely diligent about the security of our own activities in the world of electronic communication.
The cautionary rules still apply. Don’t give away your passwords, or have obvious ones. Be careful what you send or receive and what files you open. Don’t have absolutely open Facebook pages and be careful what you say on them anyway, even if it’s just closed to your friends. Know that your cellphone calls aren’t necessarily private either.
Most likely, we don’t have Anonymous, or Wikileaks wonks, or sleazy reporters on our tail; and the fate of the nation is unlikely to rest on anything that gets out.
But our own wellbeing, and that of those around us, could be seriously harmed.
There’s a great deal of damage to be done by the normal groundswell of ill-intentioned people, whether or not our paths have previously crossed.