Missed opportunity

Sadly, our tech regulations do not put us in the outside of the Asylum.

I wrote in May 2013:

New Zealand keeps ranking at or near the top of the various indices of economic and social freedoms. We could do well by encouraging greater immigration of American techies fed up with that the American governmentseems to be archiving and storing just about everything for later searches. Just show them Novopay as example of how we couldn't, even if we wanted to.

Alas, we're not immune to the shenanigans going on elsewhere. Our NSA, the GCSB, is getting a legislative redraft. Thomas Beagle of TechLiberty summarises; NoRightTurn has a few additional comments. I'm not a lawyer - maybe things aren't as bad as they seem. David Farrar is considerably less concerned....When the US seems to be doing everything it can to convince its tech guys that the government really does want to be spying on everybody, and that the IRS wants to know everything you talk about at political meetings if you have small-government leanings, the last thing we need are headlines suggesting we're heading down similar paths if the legislation doesn't actually do that. And if it does, it does need changing.

At the time, a whole pile of people offered me big assurances that the TICSA legislation was far more innocuous than the press made out and that it wouldn't just work to kill innovative startups who couldn't handle the regulations and that it was all just a beat-up by people who didn't understand the regulations and hadn't had all the super-secret briefings.

The NZ Herald now tells me that we've scared off a pile of tech investment. I guess that they didn't understand the regulations or profit from the super-secret briefings either.