"Releasing such personal information sends a message that they're not very hard to find, they aren't the only ones who can gather intelligence,” a representative of Anonymous told the New Zealand Herald after the paper tracked down a spokesperson through YouTube videos and Twitter.
The amendment, which gives law enforcement broader reach in terms of collecting personal information on suspected terrorists or enemies of state, has faced sharp criticism from those who say the legislation is too ambiguous in the privacy arena, opening the door to NSA-style mass surveillance of New Zealanders. The Anonymous spokesperson called it “an unadulterated violation of human rights, constitutionally illegal, and an invasion of the people's privacy.”
Prime Minister John Key championed the measure the whole way through, despite public opposition. "There will be times where a serious cyber-intrusion is detected against a New Zealander and the GCSB will then need to look at content – that's why the law allows that. But that should be the end point, not the starting point," Key said when it passed.
Last Friday the hacktivist group took out the website of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), a.k.a. the Kiwi spy agency, in a DDoS attack. On the surface the disruption seemed merely a nuisance, but Anonymous insists that it used that initiative to mask the true attack, which stole information from the spooks, it said. The GCSB denied that any classified data had been taken.