Diversion

The Herald reports:

The blogger who was infamously hacked and then exposed in Dirty Politics has himself admitted hiring someone to illegally access the computer files of opponents.

Whale Oil’s Cameron Slater has been granted diversion by police for attempting to hire Ben Rachinger for $5000 to get into the left wing “The Standard” blog. Instead of being convicted and sentenced, he has arranged to do 40 hours work for the children’s charity Kidscan.

Judge Richard McIlraith said: “He has accepted his guilt and embarked upon a programme of diversion to address that.”

Hacking is wrong – it is both illegal and morally indefensible. Cameron was wrong to agree to pay Ben Rachinger money to hack The Standard. As the Judge says he has accepted in court he was wrong, and done community service as diversion.

But while Cameron was wrong, he was taken advantage of by a guy who lied constantly to Cameron and fed him months and months of lies. He took advantage of Cameron’s desire to find out who hacked him, and convinced Cameron that he could prove various people were behind the hack on him – if he in turn got paid to hack them. Cameron should have reported Rachinger to the Police rather than agree to pay him. Rachinger is facing his own trial for his actions, so hence I can’t comment in depth on them.

Cameron has blogged his version of what happened here.

Hopefully there has been lessons learnt from this by Cameron and others. As someone whose privacy has been breached by hackers, I am very anti hacking. I do have to try and contain myself though when Nicky Hager complains that his privacy got breached when Police were searching for Rawshark’s identity as of course Nicky Hager has just spent weeks working with NZ media to breach the privacy of hundreds of New Zealanders who have broken no laws, but just used a law firm that got hacked.