New Zealand’s high-profile gun buyback scheme, enacted by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after the Christchurch mosque attacks, has been thrown into disarray after police admitted that at least one person had been able to access other firearm owners’ personal information online.
The error became public yesterday when a gun lobby group said it had spoken to 15 people who were able to access information on a Web site where firearms owners registered weapons to be relinquished.
It included their names, addresses, dates of birth, firearms license numbers and bank account details, the group said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“It’s a shopping list for criminals,” said Nicole McKee, from the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners.
She added that gun owners who had not turned in their weapons were “now being told they have to comply with a system that cannot be trusted.”
The Web site was shut down yesterday morning and would not be used until the police could guarantee the safety of information, officers said.
Ardern won global praise when she announced six days after a gunman stormed two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 Muslim worshipers, that the government would ban all the weapons used in the attacks.
Less than a month later, a law prohibiting ownership of most semiautomatic weapons passed New Zealand’s parliament by 119 votes to one.
Since the law change, New Zealand’s police have operated a buyback and amnesty scheme for now illegal weapons, magazines and parts which was due to finish in less than three weeks, Dec. 20, at which point owners would be prosecuted for possessing them.
New Zealand Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Clement yesterday said an update on the buyback scheme’s Web site last week had caused personal information to be revealed more widely than it should have been.
He blamed the software provider, the German company SAP, for what he called “human error.”
The site was custom-built for the gun buyback.
Clement said officers knew of only one person, a gun dealer, who had received access to the information.
Gun dealers have been permitted to act as collection agents for the buyback scheme for weapons owners who did not want to attend public events run by the police.
However, Clement said the dealer should not have been able to view so much detail, and the software update was “not authorized” by the police.
The person who had accessed it had done nothing wrong, he said.
“This is a timely reminder to us all that we have to be particularly secure with people’s personal information,” he said, adding that the police had not done anything wrong either.
SAP was “working through their audit logs” to find out what information had been accessed.
Clement said sharing personal information accessed through the site would be illegal.
“We’re pretty disappointed about this,” New Zealand Police Minister Stuart Nash said.
He would wait until he learned more about what had happened before he commented on whether anyone should be censured.
Nash said the buyback had so far collected 43,000 weapons, most of them being “the type of firearms that are used to kill people.”
A second tranche of gun reforms before parliament would introduce a guns register and strengthen police powers to prevent certain people from gaining licenses.
McKee defended the group’s decision to make the breach public, saying the revelations showed the buyback plan had been “rushed.”
“We thought that it was imperative that we get the information out to the 38,000 people that their information had been compromised,” she said. “That has to outweigh the possibility of getting more firearms in.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not