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Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

Treaty Principals Bill Scaremongering

Misleading journalism about the Treaty Principals Bill web site being attacked could lead to similar actions of accusations of interference in the election when Donald Trump lost his second campaign. This lead to his supporters defending their views of political interference which resulted in civil unrest.

RNZ, while usually a reputable and balanced New Zealand media outlet, ran this false information and scaremongering story ‘Record treaty submissions could be result of nefarious activity – tech expert‘ about the web site crash for the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill. This article has attracted multiple IT experts to question the validity of the article.

The story is unbalanced and lacks facts, spoke to IT people who while maybe experts in some areas of IT, certainly were not experts in cyber security, offered their ‘personal opinions’ which were then reported as (misleading) facts. One could speculate that the IT experts participated in the interview as they were trying to be helpful to the reporter, or perhaps for some free advertising for their companies and or a dig at the current government for wide spread budget cuts to government IT spending?

The story is gas lighting fear and scaremongering on both sides of the debate including that Māori activists are hacking the system with bots to try and get more submissions. The issue here is that Māori make up 8% or less of the IT industry and even fewer in InfoSec roles. The feasibility that Māori activists are doing the attack would make it a simple process of elimination to track down the criminals.

The other scaremongering narratives are that Hobsons Pledge are also doing the same and that they are paying international groups to hack the site. Again, without going through any logical debate about why, the impacts of being caught would likely put of many of their supporters for interfering with out democracy.

Social Facts that were ignored

The IT experts interviewed by RNZ were not Māori and clearly have no idea about the widespread scale of interest, both for and against the Treaty Principles Bill in New Zealand and indeed around the world.

Considering the population of Aotearoa in 2023 was about 5 million. Simple math would suggest that the 150,000 submissions received, represents only 3% of the population, in what is the most divisive and controversial bill introduced via the New Zealand parliament in generations. This should be of no surprise to most people that such large numbers of people are participating. Some would have expected much higher participation and that is why the Bill deadline has been extended by Parliament.

The fact that New Zealand’s largest protest on parliament occurred in opposition to the Bill with some saying 40,000 people participated. Although data scientist Caleb Moses believes it was at least 83,000 people who marched on parliament. Even then, that is less than 1% of the population who attended. The effort and costs to attend a physical protest is significant. For many the time to create an online submission would be more practicable and achievable.

Then considering that this bill has united Māori and Iwi on national scales never seen before including the Kingitanga, Ratana and recently the The Pan Māori assembly attracting tens of thousands of supporters and national movements. The multiple groups non Māori, 40 Kings Councils, academics, linguists, historians and many other groups opposing the bill. The fact that Māori lawyers and community leaders have all been offering free training to write and submit proposals all contribute to a significant growth of interest and people wanting to be proactive.

 

Technical facts that were ignored

The screenshot below shows us that the web site is hosted by a company called Radware Ltd. A Google search for those not in the industry will show you that this is a company that protects against the attacks mentioned in the RNZ article. I also note that the web site is hosted in Microsoft Azure which also has built in protections against such attacks. It is highly unlikely that these two large companies with international reputations for expertise both made a mistake that would allow the claimed attack in the RNZ article. I would cite defamation of character if I were either of the companies, or the staff involved with the parliament web site and our spy agencies.

arecord

There would be people who have direct access to the logs of the servers and other first hand insights that the RNZ interview did not speak with. These staff members would be able to see very quickly if there was an attack or just social interest being transferred from the streets to the web site.

The next issue is if the New Zealand Parliament is so easily attackable, then we have some serious democracy issues that are much wider than the Treaty Principles Bill submissions. If there were such an attach, then our Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and many other spy and security agencies would have been aware and taken action. The GCSB have said they are not aware of any attack.

If supporters either for or against the Bill used AI and to flood the web site with submissions, there are many popular tools that are able to screen out AI generated text which would then not be a part of the committees consideration. Hence, this would be pointless.

On another technical note about using an AI Bot. I would estimate that submissions would far exceed the 150,000 submissions in the one day. As  Xaviere Murray-Puhara of Kahu Code states “with a “modest 10 bots being able to create up to 864,000 submissions in 24 hours at 1 submission per second (GPT, 2024)” the numbers would way supersede 150,000 submissions.

Conclusion

The RNZ statement shows a lack of integrity, and investigative journalism that is creating doubt in the communities in the same manner as the in American elections when Donald Trump claimed the elections were rigged. We have seen the widespread issues with false information and COVID vaccines and the social disruption.

Misleading false information from reputable media like RNZ could risk fuelling new fears and more social disruptive behaviour. We could see either side of the debate claim that there was an attack and question the results if this misleading journalism is allowed to continue.

This article has formed the basis of a formal complaint to RNZ.

 

DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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