Category: Public services

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Personal Link: The Cool One has Gone.

Most KP readers will not know that I was a jazz DJ in Chicago and Washington DC while in grad school in the early and mid 1980s. I started at WHPK in Hyde Park, the U. Chicago student radio station. In DC I joined WPFW as a grave shift host, then a morning drive show host (a show called Sui Generis, both for its meaning and as a hat tip to the Argentine rock group of that name). I also had a carrell at the Library of Congress (LoC), first up under the dome of the main building with its extraordinary views of the Mall looking west towards the Lincoln Memorial, and then in the building behind the dome when refurbishments were made on it.

At some point I met one of the few other white DJs at WPFW (part of the Pacifica network that had stations in LA and NYC), which was a community sponsored black majority-staffed public radio station that still operates and features jazz, blues, world music and plenty of progressive news shows, including one hosted by the Nation of Islam (a guy called Askia Muhammed was the host). It was a cool place in which to to do music and after a short bumpy start with some of the old-timers I was well received and had good listenership numbers.

It turns out the other white guy, whose show was named Sounds of Surprise, worked in the Library of Congress in its Recorded Sound division. That division was located on the lower floors of the Law Library across Independence Ave from the main building. I used to go over there because I had a stacks pass for the foreign law archives given to me by the LoC’s Hispanic Division, something that I needed for my Ph.D. thesis research on the Argentine State because it was the only place where the complete records of Argentina’s Boletin Oficial were located (since various Argentine military regimes were prone to destroying all records of previous governments, especially those of the 1946-55 Peronist regime that was the starting point of my research). Since the LoC records were the most complete in the world, better than what could be obtained in Buenos Aires, I was very fortunate to have applied for and received that carrell as a LoC Visiting Scholar.

I mentioned this to the white DJ guy at WPFW and we started doing lunches at the Law School penthouse cafeteria (nice views to the south) and, during the warmer months, at his apartment in a brownstone down the street SE of the Library in Capitol Hill. He played incredibly rare old records (even 78s!) for me from his personal and the library collections that he was working on, and because he knew that I was especially a fan of Thelonious Monk, he always had some Monk on tap as well as a cold bottle of beer with which to enjoy the music. Those were some special days.

We stayed good friends during that time (1982-85) even though I travelled to Argentina regularly for field research and eventually gave up my WPFW show to write up the thesis in residence back at the University of Chicago. Whenever I was in DC we would catch up for more music (sometimes live gigs) and liquid lunch sessions where he opened my eyes and ears to a range of music and technologies (such as CDs) that I would not have understood had he not guided me through the intricacies of them. During that time he introduced me to his long-standing Eastern European partner (a journalist) and his newer apartment off of Dupont Circle in a building that they shared with Christopher Hitchens, among others of political bent.

Most notably, he came down to Rio for Carnaval when my first wife and family and I were living there in early 1987 during a Fulbright Scholarship research trip to Argentina and Brazil. Let’s just say that it was an eye-opening experience for him on a number of fronts, but he did get to enjoy some baile das panteiras (dance of the panthers–think of it as a lot of women and guys wrapped in very tiny lepoard skin outfits) close up and personal. He did not drink much but learned the joys of cacacha and the constant drumbeat of the street batucadas that echoed throughout the 10 days of Lent. That trip left an indelible impression on him and he even got some sun (unusual, for such an indoors kind of guy).

Sadly, after I moved to California, then Arizona, then Florida and then to NZ over the ensuing decade, we slowly lost touch, although we did communicate through a music blog that he ran in parallel to all of his other endeavours. We talked about his coming to NZ but it never came about because his health began to fail and I got wrapped up in triathlons and security related things that compounded the tyranny of distance that prevented us from maintaining closer ties. I regret that very much. In any case, you can find his extraordinary blog Lets Cool One here (its name comes from a Monk song): https://larryappelbaum.wordpress.com/

His name was Larry Appelbaum, and he was an extraordinary person.

May there always be a rhythm and musical surprise wherever you are, querido Larry!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/arts/music/larry-appelbaum-dead.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawI-08xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYL9tRk_UaMZqN5KSQxY64SKrnhOzG6wNoMvgq0BHffWVQyqkwCShhOZAg_aem__jD224k3NskcWJtwXzq7cQ

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School meals as human capital investment.

Although I do not usually write about NZ politics, I do follow them. I find that with the exception of a few commentators, coverage of domestic issues tends to be dominated by a fixation on personalities, scandals, “gotcha” questioning, “he said, she said” accusations, nitpicking about the daily minutia of pretty trivial matters and clickbait hysteria about usually inconsequential issues (such as the recent freedom of navigation/power projection exercise conducted by a small Chinese flotilla/task force that in no way presented a serious threat to NZ interests). The world is blowing up before our eyes and NZ media fixates on parliamentary bullying, politician’s name-calling, assorted partisan spin attempts and even the rhyming word salad vitriol spewing from one bloated onanist’s mouth. Rarely is there a reflection on the why of some policy controversies that extend beyond the immediacies of the moment. Worse yet, what starts out in corporate media coverage then gets siloed and echo-chambered down into social media cesspools where hatred and contempt for “others” is the most salient distinguishing feature of discourse.

As a short response, here I would like to very briefly do a reflection on the why of school meals.

Here is why: The most precious resource that a country has is its human capital. The creativity/productivity of its people are the true measure of its strength. Investment in human capital involves short- and long-term direct and indirect costs in human capital development, one of which is schooling. Since it is proven that well-fed kids do better academically and are more socially adjusted than hungry or poorly fed kids, school meals have long been considered to be an integral part of the indirect investment in (future) human capital. If for whatever reason parents cannot provide nutritious school meals for their kids to take to school (there are many, most not due to parental negligence), most societies accept the need to provide them in the school system using taxpayer-provided funding. This is not just a trait of democratic educational systems, Authoritarians well understand the concept of human capital development so are often just as prone to providing nutritious school means (often with propaganda associating the regime with school meal-provision programs).

For example, Argentina (where I was raised asa child), Brazil and Chile (where I researched and worked as an adult) all provide school meals at no or small cost to caregivers. This happened during periods of democratic rule as well as dictatorship, with the exception that the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile selectively closed entire schools and health clinics in working class neighbourhoods in order to weaken what it considered to be sources of class resistance to its murderous neoliberalism (from which NZ took many lessons, including its Labor Law reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the legacies of which remain to this day). Similarly, some of the biggest protests against the chainsaw cost-cutting approach adopted by ACT Party favourite Javier Milei in Argentina involves cutting back on school meals, something that because of its extensive history in Argentina is considered to be a birthright, especially amongst the working classes. Along with other socio-economic indicators like the over-all poverty rate (now nearly 60 percent of the population), child malnutrition has surged in the (again, poor and low income) areas where school meals are the most needed and yet where meal cutbacks have been zealously applied.

That may be by design, like in the Pincohet regime’s approach in its day. Milei’s sociopathy simply sees the lower income strata as vermin that should be eliminated, not nurtured. Parsing David Seymour’s rhetoric on his school meal program and leaving aside the dubious circumstances in which the contract for his program was let, one gets the impression that he shares Milei’s Social Darwinistic worldview. We can only hope that he does not share Milei’s view that “blue eyed people” are “aesthetically superior” to dark-eyed folk (true story: Milei actually said this in a country where the majority of the country do not have blue eyes). But then again, Seymour’s attacks on the Treaty and adjacent attacks on Maori “privileges” seem to be cut from the same cloth as Milei’s.

That having been duly noted, the bottom line is that in most countries and certainly in the developed world, current tax dollars are used to invest in pursuit of future human capital returns. It complements immigration policy in that regard, as immigration provides short-term human capital inflows that over time can be transferred into inter-generation human capital development through education and the infrastructures that go with it (like school meals). In fact, dividends on this investment come in the form of productive adults upon whom less public money is spent on welfare, health and crime mitigation services, and who in fact pay more in taxes than those who wind up as dependents of those public services. Surely the trade-off is worth it.

It is therefore mistaken and short-sighted to claim that it is not the NZ school system’s responsibility to provide student meals. Those meals are a collective good that serve both the present and future commonweal. As such, they should be nutritionally sufficient to help a young person’s development, not just a cost that must be kept low. Scrimping on meal costs and arguing about parental responsibility at the expense of boosting NZ’s future human capital is folly.

But that is where NZ is today.

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On the DOGE data sweep.

Among the many other problems associated with Musk/DOGE sending a fleet of teenage and twenty-something cultists to remove, copy and appropriate federal records like social security, medicaid and other supposedly protected data is the fact that the youngsters doing the data-removal, copying and security protocol and filter code over-writing have not been properly security vetted and have at best been temporarily deputised into public service to do the retrieval tasks. They are loyal to Musk first, second and third and MAGA/Trump fourth. They are not loyal to the US public whose data they have now appropriated. This means that all that data collected is potentially being compromised or at risk of wider exposure and can even be data-mined, gifted or sold off to third parties for purposes other than public sector auditing or transparency.

That is pretty mind-boggling. As someone who held a S/TS/SCI clearance before leaving the US for a better life overseas, I had to undergo two polygraph and background checks conducted by the Defence Intelligence Agency before being granted the clearances, and upon leaving the security community I was placed under a 20 year gag order on what I had seen/done, with any material that I wanted to use after the 20 year gag window period ended subject to DoD censoring and editing (should I have decided to write or speak about topics that included using classified materials). I say this because I handled material that was just pertinent to my official duties, not wide swathes of data about everything under the sun, so the lack of security vetting of Musk’s minions is, again, astonishingly wrong.

This has the potential to end very badly, not just for the US government or what will be left of it after this reckless DOGE wrecking ball is done with it, but for the millions of people whose data can now be manipulated and used for untoward ends. We must remember that Musk is a dishonest and unscrupulous person, his cult minions and other “techbros” subscribe to variant of an anti-democratic and Social Darwinistic ideology known as “neoreactionism,” and MAGA acolytes like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Biondi and the authors of Project 2025 now installed in the corridors of power are all too happy to use any means to pursue the Trump/Musk agenda. Since all of these people are disreputable curs, none can be trusted to prevent misuse of personal confidential data for revenge, profit or other non-accountable purposes.

The questions then become: who benefits from the data-grabbing move? The GOP? Putin? The techbro oligarchy? What is the end game?

Whatever it is, it is a disaster in the making.

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Political societies and economic preferences.

Much discussion has been held over the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB), the latest in a series of rightwing attempts to enshrine into law pro-market precepts such as the primacy of private property ownership. Underneath the good governance and economic efficiency gobbledegook language of the Bill is a desire to strip back regulations in order to give capitalists of various stripes more latitude of action.

The RSB is interesting for two reasons. One, it is the type of omnibus bill that is designed to supersede other legislation in the policy enforcement chain. It is a “mother of all laws” or foundational stone type of legislation that its proponents hope will serve as a basis for future legislative reforms and policy-making and to which all existing laws must be retro-fitted. Although it varies in its NZ specifics, it emulates the “Ley Omnibus” (later named “Ley Bases” (Base Law) pushed through by Argentine president Javier Milei last year, which basically allows for the dismantling of the Argentine State bureaucracy, reform of labor and environmental laws, slashes the public budget, and opens the economy to foreign investment.

As a result, although the inflation rate has been drastically reduced and some foreign investors have taken interest in the Argentine economy, the poverty rate now reaches nearly 60 percent, health indicators (and facilities) have cratered, pension and social welfare plans have been decimated, unemployment and crime have risen, and basic public services are on life support (including power and water provision in some areas). Despite these deleterious effects, Milei’s “chainsaw” approach has been celebrated by the ACT Party, sponsor of the RSB and its predecessors, so here again we see an example of NZ politicians borrowing concepts from similarly-minded foreign governments.

They are not alone: the incoming Trump administration’s Project 2025 and Project 47 copy aspects of Hungarian president Viktor Orban’s authoritarian-minded constitutional reforms (since it centralises power in the Executive Branch and restricts civil liberties and opposition rights). More ominously, because it is an omnibus bill that redraws the NZ constitutional map in a preferred image, it echoes the Nazi “Empowerment Law” that Hitler pushed through in the German parliament after the was named Chancellor in 1933, albeit without the repressive powers later confirmed upon him. As in the case with Milei and his Base Law (and Hitler at the beginning of his legislative campaign), the RSB depends on securing a slim parliamentary majority in order to to pass into law.

What is important to note is that such omnibus legislation is most often used in democracies by authoritarian-minded politicians who are afraid that they cannot get their policy reforms passed and accepted otherwise. It is a soft form of constitutional coup whereby the “rules of the game” are stacked via legislative reform in favour of a specific set of interests, not the public good. It is a “soft” type of coup because it uses lawful/constitutional means to achieve its ends. In a perverse way it is a sign of weakness that its proponents do so, as if they know that their preferred policy prescriptions will be rejected by the electorate in the absence of an overarching law forcing the public to follow them.

To be clear, here the focus is on omnibus or foundational laws, not more specifically drawn laws that follow from them. For example, commercial and environmental law cover aspects of social and economic life but are not “foundational” in the sense that they do not provide cornerstone underpinnings to civil and criminal law, which in turn address detailed and specific rights and obligations regarding various aspects of social life, including enforcement of those rights and obligations by an independent judiciary. “Penalties under the law” refer to this level secondary of judicial oversight, which in turn is governed by foundational principles enshrined in omnibus legislation (which is the province of constitutional law).

There is a second, more fundamental problem with this approach. It involves the distinction between political society and economic society and why they should not be intertwined.

Political societies are aggregations of people within given physical boundaries who agree upon or are forced to accept certain universally-binding rules regarding representation, leadership and collective decision-making. Because NZ is the subject of this post, we shall leave aside for the moment various authoritarian political communities. As a liberal democracy, NZ has a form of rule based on majority contingent consent to the system as given, formally expressed through elections but more granularly in the everyday actions of voters who accept their positions in the social order. People go to work, play, attend school, have relationships and generally comport themselves as members of society in accordance with commonly accepted notions of acceptable behaviour (e.g., “live and let live,” “due onto others as one would do onto oneself,” respect difference and the rules of the road, etc.). But that majority consent to any given democratic rule is contingent on public expectations being met, both materially as well as politically. Political and economic societies are formed to address (and shape) those expectations.

Economic societies are aggregations of people operating within a given productive structure, making things and generating surpluses from their labor and labor-saving inventions while exchanging goods and services. “Homo economicus” is non-political. S/he maximises economic opportunities in order to pursue material interests. The ways of doing so are many and can involve collective as well as individual effort, which is often determined by the type and modalities of production (industrial, agricultural, mixed, etc.) and the material goods being pursued.

Vulgar structuralist thought holds that the type of economic society determines what type of civil and political society emerge from it. To this day, proponents of things like (neo)modernisation theory adhere to this belief. But such views offer a simplistic read on the interplay between economic and non-economic factors, so claims such as “free markets lead to democracy,” and ” political parties are the political equivalent of economic agents in the productive process” are overdrawn at best. A more nuanced take is that civil and political life may have a grounding in economic life but are not reducible to or epiphenomena of it. In some instances, say in the cultural sphere, human behaviour is not a surface reflection of an underlying economic reality or framework.

Political society is about collective governance and civil engagement. In democracies it involves a “legal” agreement, compact, or contract about the way in which the political order should be governed, which involves ostensibly neutral institutions and processes, As such, it can co-exist with a number of economic arrangements and is not inherently linked to any one. For example, over the years democracy has coexisted comfortably with varieties of capitalism and socialism. Authoritarianism has also co-existed with capitalism and socialism. The particular combination of economic framework and governance structure defines specific variants of regime type: NZ is a “liberal” democracy because it is based on a capitalist economic foundation (first settler colonialist, now primary good export, real estate ownership and services dependent production). North Korea is a Stalinist country because it combines one-party authoritarian rule with State control of the mixed industrial/agrarian economy.

What this means is that laws in a democracy are basically a means of adjudicating disputes, avoiding collective conflicts and regulating individual and collective behaviour regardless of economic status (think of the “justice is blind” adage). Ideally, they should be agnostic or neutral with regard to economic preferences because it is possible that future generations of voters will elect to support different types of economic arrangements that they believe suit their collective and individual material interests better than current schemes.

But that is not what has happened. In NZ and elsewhere in liberal democracies, things like private property rights have been enshrined in law and thereby protected by the State. The evolution of this marriage of political and economic societies is complex but the bottom line is that NZ is a capitalist society governed by a democratic capitalist State that enforces the primacy of capital above all other things. To be sure, much lip service is given to civil liberties, human rights, equality before the law, even adherence to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. But the foundation of the modern NZ State is not based on a contract between interested parties such as the agents who signed the Treaty, or on respect for the rule of law per se, but on the structural dependence of NZ society on capitalism. The role of the NZ State is to help resolve the contradictions that inevitably emergence in a political system where a minority of voters control major parts of the productive apparatus but rely on the labour of others (wage labour) in order to generate the material surpluses (profits) that allow them to exercise (indirect) political as well as (direct) economic control in NZ society.

The RSB seeks to further deepen that structural dependence of NZ society on capital by giving certain capitalist fractions more leeway in the conduct of their self-interested affairs. When fully implemented it will atomise wage-labor both in and out of production while consolidating specific types of capitalist structural control. In that light the RSB codifies the State’s role (or non-role) in facilitating capitalists’ (aka businesses) self-interested pursuit of profit. From then on self-interested maximisers of opportunities, individual and corporate, will seek comparative advantages in the deregulated marketplace.

The problem, again, is that enshrining a specific set of economic preferences or biases in a political charter interferes with voter’s freedom of choice when it comes to their own economic interests and desires. Depending on their circumstances and structural location in the productive apparatus, not everyone may be a fan of capitalism or accept the primacy of private property rights. Some may even prefer socialism, however that is defined. Prioritizing and facilitating the pursuit of specific economic preferences contravenes the commonweal (public interest) basis of democratic political charters such as that governing Aotearoa. Instead, it rigs the societal “game” in fair of a select few.

Other, more astute minds have already voiced their opposition to the RSB on a variety of grounds. Here the point is to remind readers of why omnibus bills are inherently anti-democratic even if they are legally constitutional, and why democratic political society is distinct from and should remain “above” economic society however construed. The former deals with universal values and interests; the latter involves specific sectorial interests and their material objectives in a system structurally based on the pursuit of profit. Although they may be overlapped in fact because of NZ’s history of structural dependence on capital, the public good is best served when the political/legal framework is agnostic or neutral when it comes to sectorial interests. That is what democratic collective bargaining systems are for and why political lobbying needs to be tightly regulated. Instead, the RSB seeks to tilt the game board in the direction of a specific set of interests, not the public interest at large.

Alas, although it is not meant to be, the rightwing NZ economic and political twain have met, and the outcome is the RSB. For the reasons outlined above, that is why it should be opposed.

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Media Link: Discussing the NZSIS Security Threat Report.

I was interviewed by Mike Hosking at NewstalkZB and a few other media outlets about the NZSIS Security Threat Report released recently. I have long advocated for more transparency, accountability and oversight of the NZ Intelligence Community, and although the latter remains only as a hope the Report is a decent step towards making the NZSIS more open about how it sees the NZ threat environment. The Report is straight-forward and easy to read, and even if it does not identify sources and methods (as it should not), it gives the public a good idea (sometimes in refreshingly blunt terms) of how it prioritises the threat landscape and the means and criteria by which threats are identified as matters of national security concern.

The interview is here.

The Report is here.

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About boot camps.

I am not a criminologist or organisational sociologist, so I cannot offer a data-driven opinion on the effectiveness of military-syle so-called ‘boot camps” when it comes to rehabilitating juvenile delinquents and youth offenders. They are popular in the US and other cultures where a premium is placed on using institutionalised discipline and punishment in order to enforce compliance with social norms, even at an early age (needless to say, Michel Foucault has much to say on this subject-he has a book on the subject–so I shall refer readers to his work). Now they have been resurrected in NZ by the ruling coalition, with the first ten inmates–all considered to be “serious youth offenders” convicted of at least two major crimes–scheduled to begin their 12 month rehabilitation trial starting early next week. It will be interesting to see how that works out for them.

I must admit to being unfamiliar with the specifics of the program that is about to be trialed, so am happy to be educated about it. I should also note that the NZDF declined to participate in the program, so whatever it is modelled on may not reflect current NZDF “boot camp” practices. Perhaps it is modeled on foreign juvenile delinquent “boot camp” programs and/or staffed by ex-NZDF or NZ police or a private security company that has expertise in such matters. Again, I am all ears on the who/what/how of the project (since it is just a trial according to the government). But for the moment and whatever the relative merits, I find the whole concept of using boot camps as models for rehabilitating miscreants somewhat perplexing.

Allow me to explain why.

“Boot camp” is a euphemism for military basic training. In basic training, which lasts approximately six weeks in most countries, followed by assignment to other military units, civilian recruits are isolated from civil society and psychologically “broken down” in order to install in them new military values and technical skills. The emphasis is reducing the individual’s notion of “self” and subordinating it to the notion of “service” via the harsh inculcation of rote obedience to authority, reflexive adherence to orders and submission of the ego to the collective good of a larger whole that is united by its common training in the skills of armed combat, i.e., the military unit. The purpose of this is to turn former civilians, with all of their notions of individuality, community and the fluid relationship between them, into soldiers, that is, a cohesive group of anonymous members of a larger hierarchical entity (the armed forces) dedicated via specialised training and political purpose to destroying designated enemies of the State.

Put bluntly, boot camps turn civilian recruits into sociopathic killing machines aimed at State-designated enemies in which their psychological reorientation and education in the techniques and instruments of organised murder serve the interests of the State and the society from which they came and which the State purports to defend. Loyalty is to the in-group above all else (hence the saying that soldiers fight for each other and have “espirit d’corps”), and their collective murderous intent is fixated on designated ‘others” by the powers that be, as expressed by the military chain of command.

One might say that if anything basic training boot camps are exercises in learning the ultimate form of mass anti-social behaviour (collective violence), but with organised features and specific targets. They are anything but rehabilitative in orientation.They simply replace the “looseness” of civilian life with the discipline and technical skills required to kill and be killed in battle.

In fact, when soldiers near the end of the service careers they are put through re-orientation programs designed to prepare them for the return to civilian life. These involve de-programming soldiers of most of what was learned in basic training boot camps and re-programming them with a more social-oriented ethos conducive to their better reintegration into civil society. In other words, they are taught to unlearn the sociopathic traits learned in boot camps in order to become contributing members of society.

It therefore strikes me as odd that anyone would think that it is a good idea to give youth offenders boot camp-style training. It seems that–not to be frivolous about the issue–it would only make them better (more disciplined, organised and prepared) criminals down the road. On the other hand, if the emphasis is on the non-sociopathic aspects of basic training–service to a higher good, sense of shared community, adherence to universal norms and values, subsuming of self to society, etc.–then perhaps the “tough love” approach might work, especially if it emphasises the re-integration aspects of military end of service separation programs.

But if the emphasis is on scary drill sergeants barking orders and enforcing physical compliance, 5AM wake-up calls and 8PM lights out rules, cold showers, detention mandates, forced schooling routines, hard physical exercise and endless drills and chores interrupted by short meal breaks, then it seems that is as much about punishment as it is about discipline and consequently not conducive to the individual’s comfortable transition into being a contributing member of the community (unless one believes that punishment itself is a form of rehabilitation. That appears to be the view of those responsible for the abuse in care atrocities recently detailed in a Royal Commission Report on the treatment of minors under state care in postwar NZ. Let’s just say that when it came to rehabilitation and social reintegration of the abused children, the results were not positive, so the irony of introducing the boot camp scheme shortly after the Royal Commission’s Report should not be lost on anyone).

In any event, the emphasis on military basic training as a model for young criminal rehabilitation seems suspect given the nature of military basic training. Perhaps the emphasis should be on offering a strong hand that helps and a firm shoulder on which to lean rather than on using the boot.

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Still the 5 Eyes Achilles Heel?

The National Cyber Security Centre (NZSC), a unit in the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) dedicated to cyber-security, has released a Review of its response to the 2021 email hacking of NZ members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC, a global organization of parliamentarians) and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the well known China expert and critic. A number of problems were identified, both operational and (yet again) with regard to accountability and transparency, so I thought I would briefly summarise them.

The Review states that too much focus was placed by the NCSC on “technical” solutions to the email phishing probes instead of considering the “wider” context in which the hacking occurred. In layman’s terms that is akin to saying that the NCSC got busy plugging holes in the parliamentary server firewalls after breaches were detected without considering who was being targeted and what purpose the hacking may have served. This is remarkable because the hacking came from ATP-31, a unit linked to PRC military intelligence well known for having engaged in that sort of activity previously, in NZ and elsewhere. Moreover, the NCSC had to be alerted by a foreign partner that the email phishing efforts were part of a progressive hacking strategy whereby the ultimate target was not the emails of MPs but of the IP addresses that were being used by those MPs. In fact, the NCSC currently does not have procedures for how to respond to reports that foreign, including state-sponsored, actors are targeting New Zealanders. The NCSC found out about the parliamentary email servers hacking from Parliamentary Services in the first instance, and then from foreign partner intelligence that was passed on to it by the NZSIS.

This is of concern for several reasons, not the least of which is that it took a foreign 5 Eyes partner to alert the NCSC to something that it should have been well aware of itself (progressive hacking), and because the NCSC initially assumed, for whatever reason, that the phishing was done by ordinary criminals rather than foreign intelligence units. It also assumed that MPs were already engaged in providing their own security, even after Parliamentary Services flagged potential breaches of its email servers to the NCSC. In fact MPs were apparently told more by Parliamentary Services than the NCSC about their being targeted (albeit after the fact), and the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady’s employer, apparently was never contacted about potential security breaches of their servers.

Since MPs may have sent and received emails from multiple IP addresses attached to their official and personal devices, the security breach implications of the email hacks could be considerable given the potential cross-over between personal and official MP communications. Put bluntly, it is incredible that a dedicated cyber-security unit that is an integral part of the GCSB and through it the Anglophone 5 Eyes signals/technical intelligence network did not consider the membership of the targeted MPs in IPAC and that the phishing occurred at the same time that Professor Brady’s emails were targeted (Brady is known to have close contacts with IPAC). This is basic 1+1 contextual stuff when it comes to operational security in cyberspace, so one gets the sense that the NCSC is made up of computer nerds who have little training in geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations or how the world works outside of WAN and LAN (hint: these are basic computer terms). They simply approached the hacking attacks as if they were plugging a leaking dike rather than consider what may be prompting the leaks and red-flagging them accordingly.

The advice given by the Review was for the NCSC to engage more with the targeted individuals in real time, who only found out about their exposure long after the fact. Moreover, the Minister of Intelligence and Security was not briefed on these intrusions, much like the targeted MPs and Professor Brady were not. Again, this defies the notion of democratic oversight, transparency and accountability within NZ intelligence agencies. Worse yet, it follows on the heels of revelations that for a few years a decade ago the GCSB hosted a foreign partner “asset,” presumably a signals or technical intelligence collection platform, at GCSB headquarters in Wellington without the knowledge of the then Minister or even the GCSB Director-General. Operational control of that platform, including specific taskings and targets, were done by the foreign partner. Imagine if one of the taskings was to geotrack a foreign human target in order to eliminate that target. If word was leaked about GCSB’s hosting of the tracking platform, it might cause some diplomatic tensions for NZ. At a minimum it is a violation of both NZ’s sovereignty as well as basic notions of intelligence agency accountability in a democracy. It seems that, almost a decade later, the much vaunted reforms designed to increase intelligence community accountability embedded the 2017 Security and Intelligence Act had not filtered down to the NCSC dike-plugging level.

This is a very bad look for the GCSB, both in the eyes of its domestic clients as well as those of its 5 Eyes partners. NZ already had a reputation for being the “Achilles heel” or “weak link” of the 5 Eyes network due to its lax security protocols and counter-intelligence capabilities. This may only confirm that belief in spite fo significant efforts to upgrade GCSB capabilities and toughen up its defences, including in cyberspace. And, judging from the reactions of the targeted MPs and Professor Brady, domestic clients of the NCSC, who are both private and public in nature, may not feel too reassured by the Review and its recommendations.

It is known that the GCSB is made up of an assortment of engineers, translators and computing specialists. It has a remit that includes domestic as well as foreign signals and technical gathering and analysis, the former operating under the framework of NZ law under the 2017 Act (most often in a partnership with a domestic security agency).This brings up a question of note. If the staff are all of a “technical” persuasion as described above, then it follows that they simply adhere to directives from their managers and foreign partners, collect and assess signals and technical intelligence data as directed by others, and do not have an in-house capacity to provide geopolitical context to the data being analyzed. It is like plugging leaks without knowing about the hydraulics causing them.

In that light it just might do good to incorporate a few foreign policy and comparative political analysts into the GCSB/NCSC mix given that most of NZ’s threat environment is not only “intermestic” (domestic<–>international) but “glocal” (global and local) as well as hybrid (involving state and non-state actors) in nature. Threats are multidimensional and complex, so after the fact “plugging” solutions are temporary at best.

Given their diversity, complexity and sophistication, there are no “technical” solutions that can counter contemporary threats alone. Factoring in the broader context in which specific threats materialise will require broadening the knowledge base of those charged with defending against them or at a minimum better coordinating with other elements in the NZ intelligence community in order to get a better look at the bigger picture involved in NZ’s threat environment.

The NCSC in-house Review is silent on that.

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The boy is home.

It a remarkable turn of events my son is home 8 days after surgery. The contrast with his September surgical and post-operation experience is stark: what too 5-7 days in September (removal of most IVs and draining tubes, catheter, getting up to walk and use the loo, diminishing of painkillers on demand) now happened in just 2-3 days. His final drain was removed on Sunday and his final IV yesterday. His last chest X-ray was clear. He was then discharged last night. I am truly staggered at the contrast in recoveries and it is only now that we realise how close we came to a disaster last spring.

So four surgeries (two open chest) in 5.5. months later, we now have a basis for hope. Although his energy levels are still low–he feel asleep in the car during the hour+ drive from the city to our homestead, something that he has not done since he was five–the colour is back in his skin and he is already talking about going back to school. We will ease him into that with a visit on Friday, but it looks like the worst is over. He has a few tears in his left lung where it adhered to his inner chest wall when deflated, and his phrenic nerve may have been nicked during the procedure to remove the cystic mass enveloping it, but his diaphragm is working, his lung is inflating and both the tears and nerve should heal in time. Again, the whole process has been a study in contrasts.

It was interesting to see people from all walks of life in the wards. Some clearly have had a rough go of it. I found it refreshing that even though the rules specified just two visitors per patient at a time, the nurses were relaxed about extended family visitors circulating through. The general ward has a steel drum and xylophone available for anyone to use, and because the weekend was brilliant the instruments were moved out to a big veranda overlooking the helicopter pad. The kid in the next room had abut 25 members of his whanau out there lounging under makeshift tents made from bedsheets (the sun was blazing), playing music on the instruments and basically offering not only support to the child patient but also to his parents. In that sense it reminded me of Irish or Italian (my heritage) wakes–attendees are not only there for the departed, but for those that they leave behind. In this case the child is the priority and alive, but the family support extends well beyond the bedridden. When it comes to family values, let’s just say that some folk know how to walk the walk.

Needless to say we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Starship staff. During the seven day stay my son was in the heart ward, the general surgery ward, the paediatric ICU as well as the cardiac operating theatre and recovery room. Every step along the way the doctors, nurses, counsellors, psychologists and ward orderlies were there to help. That even extended to a multidisciplinary effort to help the kid deal with his fear of the very painful removal of the deep drains at the bottom of his mainline scar and in between his left side ribs. Between the anaesthetists, surgeons and play specialists, he had a much better experience this time around and emerged as a free boy unencumbered by his tubes or the drip trolley.

As a bonus my son spent the last three days in a single room opening onto that wide veranda overlooking the helicopter pad. He not only got to watch the choppers come and go, which allowed us to discuss the various models involved and to speculate on the patients and how crews worked in difficult circumstances for the betterment of others. But he also got to play the xylophone and make friends with some resident pigeons on the veranda, two of which he named “Bob” and “Uncle.” I am a bird fancier and the kid has followed in my footsteps in that regard, plus we have birds at home, so he quickly became buddies with the feathered residents, to the point that he was feeding them out of hand and they were perching on his arm by the time he left. To be honest, the best use of hospital food turned out to be when taming the resident birds.

We have all come out the experience much wiser in many regards, and completely thankful for the skills and compassion of others. I extend that thanks to all of you who offered your support as well. Now back to normalcy!

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An atheist finds his God.

Given the intensity of the last few days I thought that I would share what I wrote on a personal page because of the kindness displayed by family and friends, including KP readers. It basically summarises the core of the experience. Here it is:

When it comes to my son, for this atheist there is a god and it is plural. God is two teams of human surgeons working in tandem to save his life from a slow death. The saints are a staff of nurses and clinicians who do the before and after surgery work. It is very early days yet–it is less than 48 hours since he entered the operating theater–but if not a full miracle it has been a revelation of sorts.

The surgery took 6 hours, and then it took 2 hours to slowly wake him up given what transpired. The surgery was a mix of keyhole and open chest (sternotomy, for those into the lexicon). They drained him first using the keyholes while looking at the mass in real time through the telescopic micro-camera before opening him up. They went through the original scar, which was tough because there was scar tissue and metal to work through. They excised the bulk of the mass via resection (“debulking” is the term), then focused on the phrenic nerve. The cystic mass came off the nerve and they do not believe that it is damaged, although it will take time to tell whether it is intact or will regain function. But he is breathing from his diaphragm so the outlook is positive even if it takes a few months to confirm.They also found that the mass was moving to the upper right side of his chest so that was removed as well.

They then proceeded to the carotid artery. They found that it was easier to remove the enveloping mass than they expected. Think of an arm warmer being slowly unwrapped. As before (after the first surgery), his heart was not compromised by the mass. The overall outcome is to my mind astounding–complete removal of the cystic mass with only the possibility of microscopic bits left. This is way beyond our hopes.

The down side is that they scraped and cut more extensively than during the first surgery, so the kid is in agonising pain when the painkillers are wearing off. They have him on a cocktail of things normally associated with junkies because he is allergic to morphine (the cheapest and crudest painkiller), which causes him an excruciating full body itch (it turns out the entire class of opioids that morphine is part of is allergic to him). So they are working on mixes that also have a sedative effect, as he has developed a full-on phobia about tubes and drains regardless of whether they are being placed or pulled. Since we can see the vital signs monitor readings on screens connected to the cables attached to his six monitor points (electrodes connected via adhesive plastics), we can see that his heart rate, blood pressure and breathing spike at the very thought that someone is going to “mess” (his words) with the tubes.

Worse than that is hearing his cries of pain when they actually do it. The experience of hearing his cries is both blood curdling and agonising because although his phobia is mental the pain is real, even if it is just the pulling of a tape holding one of his tubes. He now has 3 big ones to go. And to be clear: this is a boy who has a very high tolerance for pain and who is steadfast and resolute when dealing with adversity. He is not a snowflake of any sort. But we also have a sense of perspective, because his are not the only cries we hear in the ward, and they are not just from children.

The best news is that when compared to his first big surgery he is in far better shape and recovering much faster. They have removed 3 tubes including the catheter (a major negative event) and he has now gotten off the bed and sat in chair twice as well as used the bathroom in a normal way. Those are major milestones that he did not achieve until a week after the first surgery and now it is just a day and a half since he got out of theater. All of his vitals are good except when he freaks out, so he has been moved from ICU to an observation room and should be sent to the general heart ward if things continue along the same trajectory. If that is the case he may, in fact, be discharged earlier than expected.

They are working on a protocol to sedate him when they take out the last big drains, which should happen in 2 days. The psychologists and pain relief people are very much involved at this point, even as the surgical teams take a step back now that the most their work is done.

The boy has a few lacerations on his left lung where it adhered to his inner chest wall when deflated, and it is leaking air, but the consensus is that the leaks will seal in the next days and weeks. The lung deflated before the first surgery and did so again before this one, so it was good that they got in before further damage was done. They cannot be sure how much it will re-inflate but the fact that he was doing deep breathing right out of the operating room is a very good sign the the phrenic nerve is working and the leaks are not major.

Anyway, we are much relieved and thankful for the surgical skills displayed by the cardio-thorax and internal medicine teams working together. It is amazing what people can do when working towards a common goal, especially at a global moment when all appears to be just the opposite.

Thanks to all of you who have offered support and empathy for what we are going through. He is not out of the woods yet and there’s a long road ahead to being whole again, but to completely jump the shark on this mix of metaphors, there is light at the end of the tunnel that leads to my son’s future.

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Seasons Greetings and a personal update.

I hope that all of you kind KP readers have a wonderful holiday season and a productive and healthy New Year.

Unfortunately it looks like my family will be spending Xmas in Starship. My son’s chest very suddenly filled up with fluid in the space of a week and yesterday he had to have 2.5 hours of keyhole (laparoscopic) surgery in order to drain it They took out 800ml on the spot and another 200 or so since then. That is a lot of fluid pressure on his left lung.

Below are photos of his X-rays taken one week apart, with the right being taken 9 days ago and the one on the left taken 2 days ago before yesterday’s surgery. You can see why the surgeons decided to move quickly rather than wait until after the holidays

The surgeons were hoping to remove some of the fibrous mass from his ribs and other tissue that they think is causing the irritation that is producing the fluid (as a reaction), but it was too difficult and risky to do. That means that we could be back for more draining in a few months. We now have to start thinking about a long-term Plan B.

My son came through the surgery OK but is in a lot of pain because they seriously poked and probed inside of him with a camera while draining his chest in order to find a way to safely remove as much of the mass as possible. It was not meant to be. The mass has enveloped his upper left ribs and his phrenic nerve, which controls diaphragm breathing. The good news is that the nerve is working and the diaphragm is moving. The bad news is that if the nerve begins to be compromised then it may have to be severed and he will lose the diaphragmic breathing on his left side. it will not kill him but it will hinder his physical activity.

They had hoped that he could be released on Xmas Eve or Xmas Day for at least the day. But from the looks of things Xmas Eve is no longer an option for release since he has two drains in him and they are still draining, which means that Xmas Day is iffy at best as well. Starship is down to skeleton crews of dedicated staff, for which we are again grateful, but you can see the downsized capability in the wards. That makes it all the more difficult to get the boy up and out of there early, as most of the surgeons are on holiday leave and the rotating surgeons are reluctant to do anything more than exercise caution with patients who are not regularly under their care (which I support). My son’s surgeon actually broke away from his holiday to do the surgery and is reportedly coming by to see him today, so his dedication is admirable and my wife and I are extremely grateful for that. But he too has a family and could use some rest. So I tell the boy that this is another unique aspect of his early life. that is, how many people have had to spend the Xmas holidays in hospital (and been able to talk about it later)?

I worry about the kid’s psychological state because he has grown anxious and stressed over the pain that he is now fully aware is part of undergoing these procedures. He was in a bad way last night and needed a pain pump to cope. Since he is allergic to morphine–one of the lesser joys was to discover that his morphine allergy manifests as a full body intense itch–he has to take a mix of other opiates/non-opiates that provide “layered” pain relief. That overlap is hard to coordinate so there are gaps in his pain relief depending on the time of day, how active he is (such as sitting up, standing, trying to walk to the toilet down the hall), etc. Having some experience with pain myself (and also being allergic to morphine, but my symptoms are hallucinations), I liken his drain incisions to deep knife wounds. So think of him as a child who has been stabbed three times in this latest surgical round, on top of the full chest opening and drain procedures of exactly three months ago. Needless to say, that is a lot for any ten year old to have to experience. It takes a toll, physically and mentally.

My hope is that whenever he gets out he can resume normal life and that being active will help re-inflate his left lung (as was happening before the sudden fluid buildup, which may or may not be related to a chest cold that he caught at school). He has been stoic and staunch throughout but I can tell that this is wearing on his psyche and dampening his spirit. He is completely over the hospital experience and fears having to come back (which is very likely). But we can only do what is feasible given the mysterious nature of his rare condition (the surgeons still do not know what the underlying cause is even after extensive testing using CT and MRI technologies as well as every standard test under the sun). Although the tumor/cyst is benign, it grew undetected for a long time and is now deeply embedded/attached to him even though the removal of the main solid mass has stopped the growth. What remains is a fibrous tentacle-like growth spread over his upper left chest skeletal structure. That appears to be the source of his irritation but again, they surgeons are not completely sure. Hence the need to start think about a long term Plan B,

in any event I do not wish to burden you with a tale of woe but writing this is therapeutic for me. What I do know is that every time I walk into that ward and see the other families clustered around their precious but sick kids, I am thankful that my son’s condition is not worse than it is and for the empathy, compassion and dedication of the Starship medical staff. Let’s just hope that “Smokin” Shan Reti does not decide to take an axe to their funding as well.