Following the intervention of Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff after Labour discovered the attack, National's general manager, Greg Hamilton, said the party would not publish any of the material.
Mr Key now shrugs the episode off, arguing if left-wing bloggers had found a similar weakness in the National Party computer system, they'd have been in like robbers' dogs. Or All Blacks! He told Radio New Zealand: "If the Wallabies on Tuesday night had left their starting line-up up on their website, on their private website, would the All Blacks go and have a look? The answer is yes. The reason I know that is it's happened."
What a difference three years makes.
In the dying stages of the 2011 election campaign, five months after National's raid on the Labour Party computer, Mr Key was outraged when he discovered his "secret" cup of tea conversations with Epsom Act candidate John Banks had been taped by one of the myriad news gatherers summoned to witness the carefully managed publicity stunt.
He was full of moral outrage that his private sweet nothings with Mr Banks might be heard and read by the rest of us. The Herald on Sunday, which had obtained a copy, asked Mr Key for permission to publish the conversation, recorded inadvertently according to the freelance cameraman Bradley Ambrose. He refused, damned the "News of the World tactics", and filed a complaint with the police.
The police promptly issued a chilling statement that it was an offence under the Crimes Act to disclose private communications unlawfully intercepted and was punishable by up to two years in prison.
Mr Key has conveniently chosen to ignore what the Crimes Act has to say about what Mr Ede and his co-conspirators had done just a few months before. The law regards computer invasion as even more heinous. Everyone who accesses a computer system and "dishonestly, or by deception, and without claim of right ... obtains any property, privilege, service ... benefit" is liable to a prison term of up to seven years.
Even just intentionally accessing "any computer system without authorisation" carries a jail term of up to two years.
That sounds remarkably like what went on in the office two doors along from Mr Key's on the prime ministerial Beehive floor. Mr Ede and his conspirators were shown the unlocked back door of Labour's computer system by one of Mr Slater's mates, idle and "bored" - his word - rich boy and one-time Auckland City councillor Aaron Bhatnagar. They burst into the computer uninvited, snooped around it at various times over a week, inviting friends to join in as well. One or other of them downloaded reams of private material to sabotage the Labour Party.
The Hager book reveals not a tinge of guilt, or worries about legality or privacy issues. Mr Bhatnagar seemed more interested in glory, telling Mr Slater he "wouldn't mind a wee wink and nod one day in appreciation". Mr Slater replied "will do", but didn't. Instead, according to Mr Hager, Mr Slater soon claimed all credit for himself.
Once Mr Slater started bragging online about their haul of Labour Party secrets, he and Mr Ede engaged in email banter about how lucky they were not to be caught out.
Just a few months later, Mr Key denounced such behaviour as criminal, and demanded the police set an example. Now it's been revealed his own office was up to the same thing around the same time. Yet all we get is a prime ministerial shrug, and the claim that the All Blacks do it, so it must be okay.
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