I just had an amazing idea that could potentially provide a digital method to answer qualitative and moralistic questions, even abortion and war perhaps. Since it is not possible to put the words “good” or “evil” into legislation, I propose a branching merkyl tree that can answer questions like whether it is good or evil to:
Cut down this rain forest?
The use of deadly weapons?
The legal use of deadly weapons under national law?
The illegal use of deadly weapons under international law?
The possibilities are of course nearly limitless but we try. Then a powerful computer to turn human speech and text into laws, highlighting issues, and applying logic from the GoodEvil Directory. Eventually GoodEvil will turn into a Deep Learning AI. Fingers crossed it stays good yeah?
While taking a copy of the entire www.electionresults.govt.nz website, I noticed this old gem. It’s the oldest PDF on the site from the Selwyn By-election in 1994.
We know governments and corporations maintain big databases about us. But we can’t verify the accuracy of it independently and privately. If the entities could be convinced to surely publish the records one at a time to logged in users, and with a mathematical nonce added to it – a private random string of characters unique to each record, and shared only with the person to whom it pertains, citizens could verify if the data is accurate.
New nonces can be added to the database as often as needed, so long as pulling down the new values was easy enough.
This way third parties could allow people to gather their nonce values in order to “see inside” the groups values across many systems. Perhaps that’s what this all about…
When I heard on facebook the case of Leef and Tawha I asked to see the evidence so I could wrap my head around it. It’s not possible of course thankfully due to the privacy act and fair enough. But when I heard of Rotorua’s 87% average conviction rate I started to dig deeper into stats, as the concept of using numbers (conviction rate percentages) to audit complex systems and discover actionable fixes appeals to me: especially the area of victimless crime and the persecution of people sans-witness/complainant.
I thought about what could be done some more and fired of an OIA request. And this webpage will grow as I add more info to it. Such as this Rotorua Daily Post which explains how 31% are given leniency: “hows 60 of the 195 drug offences in Rotorua during 2015 resulted in no court action – including 36 cases in which an informal warning was issued.”
Officially these have OIA ID’s of 429890 and 57854 to help everybody involved keep track of things. Personally it’s all the same request: to see if a very fine grained analysis of the nature of the application of the discharge without conviction rules are carried out, plus while we are at it, dig into some police and prison data to potentially support or negate our correlations if any.
Time For Some Juicy Graphs
The following graphs are all screenshots from the quite interesting Rotorua Case Study 2005 report (PDF) titled Research on the effectiveness of Police practice in reducing residential burglary from the Rotorua Police.
Perhaps this “tough stance on property theft” is what contributed to the Leef & Tawha case?
The Initial OIA Request
It starts off as some enquiries to Rotorua district court about the case of Leef and Tawha. It evolves into a full on data request to surface a tonne of hidden data using cryptographic “secure salted hashes” of the private bits. Heck we can get by with hashes of the peoples initials and year of birth, and last three digits of the IRD.
23 May Request
To this I only got the auto-reply and no official response as yet – it would cite the Privacy Act in any case.
Date: Mon, 23 May 2016 01:39:35 +1200
Message-ID: <CAK7fK0Jz7U388G+vPQ2Qwq2-UV0kA1yVYscVbg3xbE9H1ZhQRw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Can you please send me the evidence used to convict David Pake Leef and Thomas Tawha?
From: WooleyJersey
To: rotorua.dc@justice.govt.nz
Cc: Info <info@ombudsman.parliament.nz>
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Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a1147086e5eb24805336e74dd
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Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Can you please send me the evidence used to convict David Pake Leef and Thomas Tawha?
The pair, Leef and Thomas Tawha 43, and were convicted in November 2014 of poaching as many as 60 spawning trout from a highly valued spawning stream near Lake Rotoiti.
I had a quick read of said law and am curious to know further about this case.
I would assume it wasn’t the first time they did it, however, I’m not sure of this, and at any rate, prison seems an overly harsh (and expensive – at $95k/year) compared to a fine which brings in $$ for the government? Especially for a victimless crime with no complainant other than DOC? Our access rights to the rivers via the Queens Chain is awesome and likely how they made it up the river legally. But prison? For just 60 fish? How much impact really is that causing? Would love to know!
How is this not Crown versus Maori please? I know trout is introduced but that doesn’t mean you prevent others from fishing in their rivers yeah? Queens chain and all?
Regards, WoolenJersey.
26ZH Maori fishing rights unaffected by this Part
(1) Nothing in this Part shall affect any Maori fishing rights.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to customary Māori fishing rights with respect to
freshwater fisheries within South Island fisheries waters, in respect of which
regulations have been made under section 48B, for so long as such regulations
remain in force.
Section 26ZH: inserted, on 10 April 1990, by section 17 of the Conservation Law Reform Act 1990
(1990 No 31).
Section 26ZH(2): added, on 1 October 1998, by section 305(1) of the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement
Act 1998 (1998 No 97).
Sports fisheries
Heading: inserted, on 10 April 1990, by section 17 of the Conservation Law Reform Act 1990 (1990
No 31).
26ZI Taking sports fish without licence prohibited
(1) Subject to this Act, every person commits an offence and is liable to a fine not
exceeding $5,000 who—
(a) takes sports fish from any freshwater at any time, unless that person is
the holder of a licence issued under this Act authorising him or her to
take such fish from such waters at such time; or
(b) has in his or her possession any sports fish taken from any freshwater,
unless the fish have been taken lawfully.
(2) Nothing in subsection (1) shall apply to the taking of sports fish for the purposes
of scientific investigation or data collection, under a permit or authority
under this Act, and in accordance with any conditions imposed by such permit
or authority.
(3) Every person commits an offence and is liable to a fine not exceeding $5,000
who establishes, manages, or operates any fish hatchery for sports fish except
pursuant to regulations made under this Act; but nothing in this subsection
shall apply in relation to any hatchery for sports fish that is established or is
being established at the commencement of this Part.
(4) No person shall establish, manage, or operate a fish farm for trout.
Tom Atkinson – Director
The Tomachi Corporation
30 June Request
From my mail client:
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2016 03:27:11 +1200
From: Tom Atkinson
To: judicialoffice@courts.govt.nz
Message-ID: <CAK7fK0JgkKtdNt-e=bVB_D08irYYCycwfpfMraXB3T+Xo7Xi7A@mail.gmail.com>
Hi,
I would like to try to discover the following about criminal procedures act, "discharge without conviction" often called a section 106 or judge given discharge.
I am trying to discover patterns in the behaviour of:
- judges (whether they give discharge or not)
- prosecutors (to show which prosecutor present)
- the accused (plea entered, eg guilty, not guilty, no plea)
So I can answer "what fraction of discharges are for violent crime versus drug crime", and see the likelihood of discharge by judge, district court and by the race of the accused to check for discrimination.
I do not need the actual judges names - just a secure hash that I can use to link the same judge across cases.
Thanks.
Tom Atkinson - Director
The Tomachi Corporation
M: 021 257 6422 <+64212576422> | Web: tomachi.co
hope you can help – hopeI have the right people please also;
re: my OIA case id 429890 I’m trying to build a better picture of discrimination in criminal sentencing/discharges in NZ.
On 23 May I filed an official information act request (OIA case id 429890 re: study of the use of Section 106 discharge without conviction in Justice department, Courts, Sentencing in regards “cultural psychopathy / effective fundamentalist christian dictatorship” by police and judiciary). I’ve since heard back from the Ombudsmen – and now have a Case ID for the request.
If the filtering I’ve just asked for above is too difficult, I’m happy to perform the data cleansing myself – for example with a record of every judgement past 10 years:
Date of judgement
Type of judgement: eg sentence, discharge, dismissal etc (the resolution date)
Type of sentence: prison / home detention / community detention
Length of sentence in nights
Amount of fine etc
Discretion Turned Bad
When there is no witness, no victim and no complainant, the justice system (police, courts, corrections) uses it’s discretion unfairly based on culture, race, sex, religion and many other factors that are impossible to see or even control by the people involved themselves due to theuntracked subconscious psychological factors (in the minds of the judges and the way they interact with the court, and the minds and speeches the prosecutors, adn other unknown players present) because they are hidden in privacy by the Privacy Act 1993. By my calculations the NZ justice system consumes 3,248,500 prisoner nights per year! At a cost of $90,936 per prisoner per year and $900 million / year for corrections. And yet 16% are put there for the “crime” of altering their minds. Freedom of Thought? The Rastafari should be able to burn incense just like a catholic priest burns his incense. Anything less is a fundamental christian dictatorship using “smell” as evidence when you can’t take a photo of an aroma https://www.legalise.org.nz/synod/
Some data points I will need to be able to extract please are:
how many people are in jail each night (include home detention)
a way to group victimless crimes (conservation act 1987, benefit fraud, drugs, traffic etc)
ability to compare some points of data with how many people walk free also due to the use of discharge without conviction, judicial cancellation of the case (eg prosecution evidence too weak and case is dropped), use of plea bargain (reduction of charge from cannabis supply to cannabis procure for example, due to lack of evidence, due to lack of witness, victim or complainant).
try to discover any bias based on age, location, judge, jury, prosecutor, defence, religion, culture (drugs), race (fish and game), sex (employment, prostitution etc)
discover actionable insights to fix the problem
Collusion and Refutement // Conviction Rates and Probability
I would like to discover who the following 2 sets of pairs (two people on the day) of people are:
a) the most colluded judge and prosecutorpair and; (highest percent discharge)
b) the most refuted judge and prosecutor pair; (lowest percent discharge)
c) without revealing their identity;
The data you provide will not allow me to personally identify anybody, but it will not preclude the possibility in the future should a Royal Commission of Enquiry or similar request leave from the privacy act to do so.
Privacy Act Compliance via Secure Hash
My OIA seeks to rectify this untenable situation by securely and privately extracting the data we need to fix the system using a secure hash of the:
* it is possible to securely scramble and make public private data by the use of a random “salt” added to the data + a mathematically irreversable secure hash function or “digest”, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function
Figures need to also show EM curfews like home detention and community detention as well as prison time.
Thanks so much in advance!
Looking forward to seeing the data and helping solve our systemic racism, and our cultural psychopathy toward the rastafari. It appears NZ has become a fundamentalist christian dictatorship: it is time we had freedom of thought (cannabis), as well as freedom of speech.
Black/Rasta Lives Matter – We live in a radical christian dictatorship that is currently putting hundreds or maybe thousands of innocent people behind bars (16% of prison population may have no victim, complainant, or witness, and the Rotorua conviction rate is 87%)
It appears that you have sent us a copy of your email for the Ombudsman’s information only, and accordingly we will not take any action at this stage.
If we have misunderstood the situation and you are seeking an Ombudsman’s intervention, then please provide full details of your complaint via our online form, or post (to PO Box 10152, Wellington 6043).
We will then assess the matter and let you know if an Ombudsman can assist.
Yours sincerely
Office of the Ombudsman | Tari o te Kaitiaki Mana Tangata
PO Box 10152, Level 7, SolNet House, 70 The Terrace, Wellington
Corrections
C79027
Stats NZ
Thank you for your email received 11 July 2016, requesting, under the Official Information Act 1982 (the Act), information about discrimination in criminal sentencing or discharges in New Zealand.
Statistics NZ does not collect, hold or have access to the requested information for convictions and discharges in New Zealand, and therefore are unable to answer your request. However, we understand that your request has been received by Ministry of Justice and they are preparing a reply to your request.
Hackathon on The Awaken Direct Democracy App awaken.guru
Meet the creator Tom Atkinson, check out the Tech Cafe at GridAKL!
GridAKL
Objectives:
– get some other top-level programmers onboard (ideally at least 1 or 2)
– get a group of interns who wish to learn to code via the project onboard
– do some quick and dirty setups, signups, experiments
– high level chat about how online voting can practically work in NZ
– see who wants to help with graphics, admin etc.
– see if it’s possible to come to agreement on some core concepts like revokable votes and why they are useful
I’ll put up a Meetup.com page shortly and link it here. ###NeedsEdit
– install the app server environment of contributors laptops
– discuss everybodies preferred technology stack (doesn’t have to be node, maybe “Go” would be nice for the high performance crypto parts?)
– generally set everyone up, mail list, google docs, github, etc
– fire up an oauth login with google/facebook with view to use realme later
– fire up rootstock libraries and look at what democracy code is avail already out there
– talk about creating a pegged currency exchange 1:1 that rides the NZD, perhaps call it Zilands or ZLN, with small transaction fees used to pay for costs of system
– talk about the core values: revokable votes, voting on all bills past, current and future, the design of
– legislation design, and the operation of parliament would remain untouched potentially for many many years, I’m thinking 5 to 20 years; this system will need to mirror it in parallel
– the need for paper based audits / print outs
– cryptographic structure: election commission keys, independant observers keys, personal keys, electorate keys, there will be a lot of public/private key pairs spread around. need to handle these being lost/destroyed/stolen gracefully
– observers can see the vote contents, quantity, timing; but not the identity of the voters
– voters can see their own votes due to ownership of their own private keys
– voters private keys are generated on their own machine and never transmitted out
– government signs voters keys via realme session
– observer sees the unknown voter vote; the government does not see the contents of the vote but does see the citizen ID
– overall the system can do real-time sums = total up all the votes for preliminary result
– the final result is inspected and signed off using a special set of federated keys – spread geographically amongst trusted holders such as justice of the peace etc; the final signing of the election result can be verified by a sub-set of the guardians keys, in case guardian keys are destroyed or lost it is still possible to unlock the result to see it.
– observers guarantee the truth of each polling booth
– everybody can see results down to the polling booth detail
– voters can watch the polling booth totals publicly increase fractions of a second after voting
* Hey brother, if you are reading this, we must share something in common, but also you are such a great bass player I hope the other guy doesn’t mind my saying I prefer Katchafire in the early days hehe.
** I just got a reply from the courts….:
Hi Tom,
Firstly, I appreciate both the time taken to write to about your concerns of a particular case which featured in a recent media article.
However, as you are not party to proceedings I cannot provide you with information regarding this case. While I am able to investigate matters relating to administrative procedures conducted by court staff, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on or interfere in the outcomes of judicial proceedings. It is a fundamental principle of our constitutional system that, in order to maintain the integrity of our court system, court proceedings must operate entirely independently.
Kind Regards,
******a ********n
Court Services Manager | Criminal – Rotorua High / District Court
