Section 14

In the wake of the successful second reading of Sue Bradford’s amendment to the Crimes Act, which would outlaw smacking, CYFSWatch has entered the debate with a post describing a fantasised beating of the MP and suggesting she is “a worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination.”

The question is: does this post constitute something close enough to an act of force that it should be banned?

And the answer is no. Expressing violent fantasies doesn’t do much for CYFSWatch’s cause, given that they’re advoctaing on behalf of people who have had children removed by the state - parents who have probably been accused of abuse - but that doesn’t mean that their opinions should be illegal.

The fantasised beating is an attempt to explain the difference between smacking someone and beating them up, a key distinction that opponents of the anti-smacking bill feel is being glossed over. It’s written in a graphic manner but I don’t believe it constitutes a genuine threat. It is simply strong rhetoric.

Likewise, the supposed “death threat” is political commentary. Bradford’s position has roused strong emotions and this is an extreme expression of that. The writer does not threaten assassination, but simply calls Bradford “worthy” of assassination. How many people have made the same assertion about George W. Bush? There’s no evidence that the implied threat is anything more than hyperbole or that the writer has the means or intent to carry out a real attack.

Should genuine violent intent become apparent, a line will have been crossed from thought to action and preventative action will be required by the Police. Until then no action should be taken against the writer and Bradford should carry on with her job as a parliamentarian uncowed.

UPDATE 11:00am: CYFSWatch is gone - shut down by Google. The Watching CYFS site is still active but doesn’t contain all of the CYFSWatch posts.

UPDATE 23/2/07: CYFSWatch is back, this time hosted by WordPress, but the old posts have not been restored. I wonder whether they can stay inside the WordPress terms of service or whether the Ministry of Social Development’s crack legal team will carry the day.

UPDATE 1/03/07: The WordPress site has disappeared, saying that the authors have deleted it. In a post at a new Blogger blog, the authors claim they didn’t delete the WordPress site and have asked WordPress what happened.

UPDATE 3/03/07: They’re back, this time with their own domain.

It’s started.

After two weeks of “working 24/7 to get the site shut down” the Ministry of Social Development has convinced Google to remove (as far as I know) a single post from CYFSWatch. The censored post accuses named Child, Youth and Family staff of murdering a child, contrary to a coroner’s finding that is disputed by the parents.
With the threat of censorship, an insurance policy has appeared in the form of Watching CYFS - a repost of a swag of CYFSWatch material with a different blogging host.

With the cost of publishing down to zero, government censors could work 24/7 for eternity and still achieve nothing.

Ministry of Social Development (of which Child, Youth and Family - CYF - is a part) CEO Peter Hughes’ decision to try and censor the CYFSWatch blog has badly backfired.

As of Friday afternoon, the site is still up and running. Google has so far stood firm - talking to the NZ Herald, Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand said,

We only remove content from a blog if it expressly violates the terms of service or if ordered to do so by a court order.

And public interest is huge. No one would ever have heard of this site if Hughes hadn’t launched his doomed censorship campaign.

As an indicator of how much interest there is in this now, traffic to this blog has more than doubled since I posted on the topic on Wednesday lunchtime. The top ten search queries landing here at the moment are:

1. cyfswatch
2. cyfs blog
3. cyf blog
4. cyf name and shame
5. cyfs watch
6. cyfswatch blog
7. name and shame
8. cyf
9. cyf watch
10. cyfswatch new zealand

and so on into at least the top thirty.

I would refer Hughes to my previous post on Scarcity and ‘psychological reactance’, which pointed out that censorship not only makes people far more interested in the information under threat, but also makes them more inclined to believe it.

Lindsay Mitchell is reporting (UPDATE: So is NZPA and the NZ Herald) that Ministry of Social Development CEO Peter Hughes has “instructed lawyers to work 24/7 doing whatever they have to, to shut down the CYFS Watch blogsite.”

CYFSWatch is a controversial new blog that is attempting to hold Child, Youth and Family staff accountable for their allegedly destructive actions by publishing ‘name-and-shame’ articles about the individuals involved in various cases.

CYF is likely to be under pressure from the PSA, its staff’s union, to do something about the site (UPDATE: PSA press release), which is threatening to publish the personal details of CYF staff including photographs and home addresses.

If the allegations made on the site are true then the authors have every right to publish them, however “robust” you might find their methods. If not, the answer is not for an arm of the government to shut down the site but to sue the authors for libel although, given their anonymity, that could prove difficult.

It will be interesting to see what CYF does here and, if it comes down to it, whether Google (Blogger’s owner) will do the government’s dirty work and censor the site. Given the nature of the Internet, any information that is censored will no doubt just pop up somewhere else.

UPDATE: Around the blogs:
Not PC: When bureaucrats attack
Kiwiblog: The CYFSWATCH Blog
No Right Turn: No freedom to criticise CYFS