An open letter to Judith Collins

A tweet of yours turned up on my twitter feed today, and having a day off work I actually caught it. This tweet is captured for posterity below:

I would like to take a few of your precious seconds, if I may, to advise that you aren’t exactly correct in this assumption. Granted, tech issues are really difficult to grasp unless you’ve grown up around them or taken a serious interest. We all appreciate this. There is a movement called Adopt an MP which hopes to address that many of our elected officials have little idea of what is going on around the Internet, and tech in general

If I may, could I explain what Anonymous is doing here? What has happened to your website, along with many others linked to the National party, is what is called a Denial of Service attack. If hacking is kind of like picking the lock to your mailbox to read your letters, this is more like taking a sledgehammer to it so that no one can use it at all.

A Denial of Service (or DoS) attack isn’t used to gain information or modify systems, they used are to annoy, harass, and to stop information from getting out. Your fear of things happening to people’s bank accounts is somewhat unfounded, unless of course you are worried about websites being taken down and blocking off access to internet banking, in which case I am apologetic.

Of course, a bill being sponsored by your own party gives more reason to fear. The GCSB bill allows Government agencies free reign to look into anyone’s private communications and information. This makes me fear what your Government could do to people’s bank accounts.

Please, if you have any further questions as to why this attack is happening, or about tech in general, feel free to reach out. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who would be happy to take the time to help.

Thanking you,

Richie White.

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