Debunking Suzette Dawson – Part 1
I was amused yesterday to find that I am featured in Suzie Dawson’s latest propaganda piece protectsuzie.com (pdf warning) as the second link under smears. In reply, I thought I should start going through her apparent proofs and accusations and seeing which were true, lies or just exaggerations. There are more than what I thought.
But first a slight rewrite.
Suzie has been subjected to a series of people calling out her bullshit from 2012 up to the present day. Each time these people have questioned her bullshit Suzie has obfuscated, lied, used legal threats, social media attacks, and so on to avoid having to answer. Some people have read them on the Internet and tried to warn others about her bullshit. Real accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms have pointed out her bullshit. I can’t speak for anyone else calling out her bullshit but in my case it is not a full time job. It is however very time consuming and requires several large spades. Suzie has only had me change one thing in the entire time of my website. All the other assertions have stood. That one thing was the current number of executive in the Internet Party. Something that she said in mediation caused her serious emotional distress….No, I don’t know why.
Mason Bee
So, yet again I invite Suzie Dawson to provide some better evidence, or in many cases some evidence at all….again.
Graphs and statistical analysis?
Wikileaks
Since 2010 Suzie has supported, promoted and shared content related to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange on social media. In 2011 Suzie started reporting on events related to WikiLeaks and Manning for the Occupy NZ media team blog ‘Occupy Savvy’. In 2014 WikiLeaks followed Suzie and began sharing her reporting on events that were occurring in New Zealand and has continued to circulate her journalism each year since. Suzie’s long-form articles and interview appearances were regularly shared by Julian Assange up until his silencing in 2018, when Ecuador cut off his internet.
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Activism reporting from 2010 looks good but if I wrote “my graph” you would see this idea of “activism” going back a lot longer than that. It really doesn’t really mean anything. I could write one like,
I have been involved in activism from a young age both within and without my family including fighting apartheid, nuclear testing, and fighting for conservation, historical preservation, social justice and indigenous rights. Together we have been instrumental in starting some of the largest political movements in New Zealand and conducted high level Treaty of Waitangi negotiations.
me
More recently, I have been involved in large scale conservation efforts costing tens of millions of dollars and co-managed a multimillion dollar trust for some of the poorest people in New Zealand in order to insure their health and ability to fairly represent themselves to government agencies. Since 2006 I have been published in privacy related publications and since 2001 have been an active advocate for privacy and fighting the invasive state.
All of the above is actually true. It’s also bullshit. I have used conflation, association and some fancy wording and lettering to give the impression that I am something different than what I am. I could actually add more links to the above statement than Suzie does to hers which should give you an idea of what I think of her proof-iness.
The point of this is that just because someone can present themselves in a certain way it doesn’t mean it’s accurate. If you look at her Wikileaks assertions her proof of reporting on Manning is just her quoting from a news article in 2012. None of the other links are earlier than 2014, Wikileaks retweeted her once a year and Mr Assange retweeted the same event twice, an online piece called “Being Julian Assange”, which is apparently what she calls being regularly shared.
Perhaps at this point I should bring up how I am involved in the settling of the South Chine Sea dispute. See what I mean? That sentence is provably true, but isn’t at all accurate.
Unity4J
#Unity4J Suzie is a co-founder of Unity4J, an organisation that engaged with nearly 100 high profile
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figures and thousands of citizens around the globe to advocate for the freedom of Julian Assange
Also an organisation known for attacking prominent whistle-blower defenders, dividing the Assange support community and inviting in the far right. Look, I’m not going to go into Unity4J in depth. If you want to know what a sham it is then I suggest you start reading The Gatekeeper Files: Rise of the Alt-right and the rest of the series or The ‘no politics’ trap – leaving the gate open for the far-right in #Unity4J for starters.
JA4Me
#JA4Me The first campaign that Suzie founded to support Julian Assange, upon which Unity4J
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was later modelled off
JA4ME is a campaign where she tried to collect everyone’s photos which is extremely dodgy. It is also what she was working on when Wikileaks expressed concerns about her similarity to the FBI informant Sabu which can also be considered interesting since it was a year after she wrote that Sabu targeted her with an online relationship?
Occupy NZ Media
Occupy NZ Media Suzie joined the Occupy NZ group in September 2011 and the Occupy Auckland media team in October 2011. She was a co-founder of the media team blog ‘Occupy Savvy’ and regularly live-tweeted at actions and events on the ground, including the evictions of the four sites of occupation in her city. She was a part of the team that nationally exposed the presence of police officers with fake badge numbers operating at the evictions of the occupations
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Here she leaves out attacking long time activists and smearing them as intelligence service informants. Occupy NZ Media is a funny little thing for Suzie, she differentiates between praising her media team and saying she did it herself. Yet again, what she says should be taken with a large grain of salt. Also, for all Suzie Dawson’s supposed Occupy credentials, at the time she was apparently sitting in a house she owned in a high paying job but then suddenly decided to leap into activism with Occupy. It’s actually worth quoting one of the lead activists talking about her at the time,
BEWARE of those who act like the 1%, without openness, transparency or democratic accountability.TIf people come from nowhere, with no proven track record in the ‘protest’ / ‘activist’ movement, and make a beeline for controlling the message, or means of getting the message out – act in ways which cause dissension or conflict within the group, spread misinformation / disinformation about people, without facts and evidence to back it up – BEWARE!!!
Indymedia
Being involved in ‘media’ gives such people the ability to mix and mingle and take photos from inside the ranks of the ‘protest’ movement.
Where exactly are those photos going?
BEWARE of those who act like the 1%, without openness, transparency or democratic accountability.
It is also interesting that she says she was part of a team that exposed the presence of fake badge numbers since it is actually attributed to one person, Merlin Blackmore.
Internet Party
Internet Party Suzie was in communication with internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom years before the
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founding of the Internet Party and supported and promoted its launch. She covered Party events live,
gained exclusive interviews with key Party leaders, and her work was shared by them on social media.
In 2017 Suzie was invited to be the new Party Leader of the Internet Party, and stood for the NZ
General Election as the #1 List Candidate, while in exile. She currently serves as the Party President
In the Internet Party she lost an election, 3000 members, never paid back $8000 borrowed from a member, used the party for personal gain ($60,000+) and did little to nothing to fight the Intelligence agencies in New Zealand. It cannot be stated enough how bad Suzie Dawson has been for Internet Party New Zealand. Insert video…
As for her communications with Kim Dotcom in his letter of supposed support for her all he says is,
Also it looks like there were only seven articles with the words Internet Party written on her website over three years. One of the exclusive interviews is with Laila Harre who was a key Party leader. At some point I think I will ask her about Suzie. It should be quite interesting. Suzie Dawson was not an active member of the Internet Party though, or probably even a member, before becoming leader in 2017.
SaveGI
#SaveGI A campaign to oppose seizures of state homes by the government. Suzie live-tweeted at
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events, providing media support as state housing tenants and activists were beaten and arrested by police
Which she has brought up in the past as a reason to be targeted although it was covered well in the NZ media. I see she has now put the activists back in whereas in the past she claimed it was only ordinary people.
ANFS
#ANFS The ‘Aotearoa Is Not For Sale’ Campaign against privatisation/asset sales in New Zealand.
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Suzie live-tweeted from the ground at action days, shot live video and blogged about the events
I remember it but not her. Unfortunately, it failed.
TPPANoWay
#TPPANoWay Suzie was a social media admin for ‘It’s Our Future New Zealand’, the movement
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founded by Auckland University Law Professor Dr. Jane Kelsey to fight against the Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement – which was a transnational corporate power grab. Along with another member
of the Occupy NZ media team, Suzie co-founded the hashtag #TPPANoWay (now infamous in New
Zealand) and it trended at #2 worldwide on Twitter. Suzie covered and helped promote live events,
conducted interviews, and blogged about the movement, which spread nationwide
I don’t know about the hash tag but this is just about the only thing that Internet Party NZ has done for New Zealand in the last two years. Well this and they commented on a University name change(pdf warning). The submission was made as Internet Party Assets Incorporated though, from memory this was because there wasn’t enough people supporting in the democratic part of the Party but I could be wrong on that.
TTIP
TTIP (Berlin) During Suzie’s stay in Berlin, Suzie participated in the opposition to the European
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version of the TPP, known as TTIP. She shot incredible live video of a mass action (250k people) live,
and her reporting was published on Mintpress News
I wasn’t in Berlin but if you read the article she touts as being “published in Mintpress” you will find at the bottom,
“Content posted to MyMPN open blogs is the opinion of the author alone, and should not be attributed to MintPress News.“
… which is so Suzie Dawson it’s unbelievable. Her speech at Chaos Club has a similar problem with it. Also on the side is,
“MyMPN is MintPress News’ community site. Anyone can participate by writing a diary and commenting on others’ diaries.”
Dirty Politics
Dirty Politics In 2014, Kiwi investigative journalist Nicky Hager published his seminal book on
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political corruption in New Zealand “Dirty Politics”. Suzie covered live promotional events.
Suzie was aggregating media about, and reporting on, the major unfolding political scandal.
For those that do not click on the link, “covering live promotional event” actually refers going to a town hall book release and getting a book signed, “aggregating media” is a list of websites in a post and “reporting on” appears to mean tweeting about. I tried contacting Nicky Hager about Suzie using his name for self promotion but have heard no reply as yet.
Anti-Drones
Anti-Drones Suzie was a Facebook admin for the international group Occupy Drone Warfare. She filed an OIA request with the New Zealand Police which ultimately confirmed that police drone Operations in New Zealand were being outsourced to private, for-profit, unaccountable companies.
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In this case people should realise that filing an information request sounds good but takes a couple of minutes on the website. The Police answered her OIA with yes they had used drones twice to photograph difficult crime scenes. I don’t see how that proves that the request “ultimately confirmed that police drone Operations in New Zealand were being outsourced to private, for-profit, unaccountable companies.” Here is the Police reply.
Interestingly, I have just as many OIA requests as she does which is pretty amazing since she is apparently an uber-journalist and activist and I am supposed to be a lowly smear artist.
FBI In NZ
Yes, the FBI were in New Zealand as liaison and perhaps more during the Kim Dotcom raids. However there was never any proof that they were anything to do with Occupy NZ. Also a subtle difference to non New Zealand readers, where you think of the Occupy movement as having a lot of violence from the police in New Zealand. In fact the Police initially refused to move protesters as they told the Council trying to evict them that they do not believe the activities of the protesters justified their involvement.
The link given for Occupy Oakland also doesn’t appear to be to the official blog of Occupy Oakland. It goes to Hella Occupy Oakland instead. A search of Occupy Oakland’s actual website reveals no trace of Auckland.
FBI In NZ In 2012 Suzie’s long-form journalism about the FBI’s incursion into New Zealand during
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the raids on Kim Dotcom’s mansion (January 20th, 2012) and the raids of Occupy Auckland (January
23rd and January 26th, 2012) was picked up and published by the Occupy Oakland media team on their
official blog. Oakland had the second largest, most well-known and targeted occupation in the world.
GCSB
Of course the GCSB hashtag went viral, it’s the acronym for the Government Communications Security Bureau. You want to write that? Here is it’s use in 2010 two years before Suzie Dawson. Whether or not she was the number one social media influencer is also up for debate.
#GCSB Suzie was the #1 social media influencer on this iconic New Zealand hashtag, which
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was named after the Government Security Communications Bureau (GCSB), New Zealand’s version of
the US’s NSA. She worked full time to gain buy-in from high profile NZ figures to oppose the GCSB
sending the hashtag viral in New Zealand, where it trended at #1 for weeks and clocked over 50,000
tweets. She covered public campaign meetings and live events, and conducted video interviews.
MOT
This is laughable. The link for authoring and circulating media resources is a paste bin pointing to her own blog apparently written five hours before the event, “covering the event” appears to mean being at the venue along with thousands of others, “exclusive video” is a blurry shaky video with a short interview with a politician who sarcastically says,“So nice to see a real journalist here” (If you want to know why I think it is sarcastic, ask Dawson.).
Also note the video numbers, in the five years since being posted the first video has gained 4500 views and the second 886. At current viewing rates my first video on Suzi3d will reach 8500 views in that time. This really goes to the heart of her supposed media epic-ness in New Zealand. She wasn’t and isn’t.
#MOT Event Suzie promoted the 2014 event ‘The Moment of Truth’ (#MoT), appearing on Australian
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radio and authoring and circulating media resources. The event featured Kim Dotcom, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, and was an expose on the New Zealand government’s complicity in mass surveillance. Suzie covered the event live and gained exclusive video content on the night
Panama Papers NZ
Not really up on this one but if you look at the link her blog post her professed warning from long ago is a link to an Irish blogger that she (or her “media team”) may have made and the rest of the post does not include “making multiple new findings of damning information” but instead copy and pasting others reports.
Panama Papers NZ While not one of the official collaborating journalists, Suzie unearthed new
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implications concerning New Zealand’s then-Prime Minister John Key and his lawyers in the Panama
Papers scandal and began her own investigation, making multiple new findings of damning information
AntiSpyBill
This actually happened using money from the New Zealand government. But, in the first video Suzie got side tracked and forgot about the anti-spy-bill. I know because I was the Facebook admin on the night and it was such a catastrophe I ended up apologising to Pirate Party members who had come to help draft it. Where is the AntiSpyBill? There isn’t one. Instead the footage paid for by the New Zealand government has been used by Suzie for self promotion for years.
#AntiSpyBill During the 2017 election campaign, Suzie pioneered an online event series deemed the
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AntiSpyBill, to draft citizens-initiated legislation against illegal and immoral practices of state intelligence
agencies and their contractors. Each episode featured whistleblowers, ex intelligence officials and anti-
surveillance activists from around the world
DecipherYou
#DecipherYou In late 2017 Suzie launched Decipher You, becoming the first journalist in the world
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to analyse Snowden documents live online. Across the course of 35 episodes, she poured over 1000s
of documents from the historic 2013 leak, making unique findings and publishing them
Actually if you look on YouTube there are lots of journalists analysing the Snowden documents online and live in this case is probably a technical term for “didn’t want to pay anyone”. This did actually happen at least.
1VS5i
Suzie Dawson’s current give me money scheme. Just watch this, it may amuse or horrify you.
#1vs5i In 2019 Suzie kicked off the #1vs5i campaign to crowd-source funding to launch lawsuits
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to hold the intelligence agencies who had targeted her for her journalism and activism, to account. As
part of the campaign, she filmed 10 live episodes of ‘Opening The Five Eyes: Exposing The Spies’,
examining key documents from Snowden and WikiLeaks files as well as from open source spy texts
Free Schapelle
Free Schapelle Outraged by the draconian prison sentence awarded to Schapelle Corby, a young,
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Australian woman in Indonesia, Suzie formed an Auckland chapter of the movement to free her and
held a series of candlelight vigils to raise awareness about her plight.
This is best debunked by her own post title and content,““Call the blogpost ‘They Sent A Helicopter For 10 People’” #F28 #SchapelleCorby” where she goes on to claim a helicopter was spying on them in central Auckland (quite a few helicopters in the central city) amidst the skyscrapers. It also appears to be a Maori rights protest as well if you read the signs.
For those who don’t know who Schapelle Corby is, she was a young Australian woman convicted of importing 4.2kgs of cannabis into Bali. She was sentenced to 20 years by the Denpasar District Court and imprisoned in Kerobokan Prison.
Rapebusters
Roastbusters The ‘Roastbusters’ scandal is one of New Zealand’s most egregious cases of
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police misconduct, leaving 35+ teenage girls devastated by the failure of Police to arrest or charge
a group of self-admitted pack rapists. One of the rapists is the nephew of a police officer, and
another is the son of a local celebrity. Suzie covered a series of actions calling to hold the Police
and the rapists to account, speaking out personally against Police malpractices in handling
complaints, and the response of then-Police Minister Anne Tolley.
Yet again look at the evidence she presents Suzie covered links to two articles, one a request for people to protest and the other about the five people protesting (not including Suzie, she must be behind the camera!). The videos have a total of 500 views in five years. Also, Suzies ideas on rape change seeming dependent an whether she is complaining or someone else is.
OilFreeSeas
#OilFreeSeas Suzie supported the Greenpeace New Zealand OilFreeSeas campaign against
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offshore deep sea oil drilling by international oil exploration companies. She attended and covered
events, live-tweeting and capturing photo and video footage for circulation on social media
I wasn’t going to say anything about this one and then I followed the link. Apparently Suzie went to the beach (Piha) with some friends and then to make it look like a bigger protest so she took pictures of the people between the life saving flags. For those overseas that is where you sit if you are swimming between the flags so the Surf Life savers will be watching you. The live tweeting, photo and video footage of the events appears to be Suzie at the beach with two to four friends taking photos of their banner with people there for a swim in the background to make it look better.
NZ4Gaza
#NZ4Gaza Suzie and a fellow media team member devised the hashtag #NZ4Gaza to build a
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digital campaign for, and better support, pro-Palestinian activists in New Zealand who were devastated
by Israel’s bombing campaign of 2014 that was killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children.
Suzie reported on events live, capturing photographs, interviews and video, and blogging about
what was occurring. Her coverage was picked up on multiple occasions by RT.com and others
OK, here Suzie went to a protest march and took lots of photos and did lots of tweeting. When she says her reporting was picked by by RT what that actually means is that they used some of her tweets and images. I can’t even figure out if it is a proper news article or who the journalist is. There is no attribution.
One of the links she uses for evidence points to apple.com. At this point I don’t think Suzie actually thinks anyone is going to go through the links but on the other hand maybe she is about to say Steve Jobs owes it all to her. 🙂
AAAP
First link, the very large police presences were because the 80 protesters, of whom some appear to be AAAP, were trying to get into a building where the Prime Minister was giving a budget speech. This appears to have happened on a different day from Suzies six tweets. Actually, it’s a bit of a strange picture. Although the police appear to be being pushed no one appears to be pushing. And it is the only picture taken from the day and probably not by her. The ones that appear to be by her were on April 5th, not May 16th.
Her live tweet appears to have been five or six tweets at another protest on April 5th where there appear to be only 5 police separate to the protesters in a photo.
The link to the video appears to back that up.
The final link is worth quoting as it shows although there may have been large Police presences there apparently wasn’t much trouble. In fact, she appears quite friendly to them,
There was one tense moment that we haven’t described here yet; where protesters stood on the barricades with banners and between the four paddy wagons present and the over-the-top police presence we really thought that it might end in mass illegal arrests (and undoubtedly many people later released without charges) however a genuine congratulations is in order to the NZ Police for above all remembering that there were children present and allowing the event to come to a close naturally, with no arrests. Thank you for that.
#AAAP For a number of years Suzie supported and attended events held by Auckland Action
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Against Poverty (AAAP), including several with very large police presences. Suzie live-tweeted, took
photographs, got exclusive interviews and video, and wrote the truth about what was occurring
In conclusion
I have just gone through a fairly extensive list of what Suzie Dawson has posted as proof of her extensive activism and at this point there are some questions that should be asked. Like, what was she targeted for? What part of the above made the security services want to kill her to such an extent that they were willing to do it in public with lasers and then suddenly, having failed, never completed their mission.
I have spend a large part of the last fifteen years living on a small island off the coast of New Zealand with a population of around 1000 people and I can think of five people on that island who have a higher profile list of achievements in New Zealand activism than Suzie Dawson. People like Johno Smith who has protested kauri felling, installed solar panels on Parliament, scaled oil rigs, and posted banners on parliament. In other words, real activists. Suzie Dawson is a relative unknown in New Zealand. Johno Smith has informed hundreds of thousands of people about the environment and still lives in New Zealand. Sue Bradford, John Minto, Nicky Hager, etc….Here is an extensive list of New Zealand activists and Suzie Dawson isn’t even on it.
She did some of the things above but none of them are apparently anywhere near the level of activism to actually annoy the Police let alone the security services. Yet she tries to associate herself with Snowden and Assange and intimate that she is a major activist yet in activism terms she hasn’t done anything major enough to be targeted. So, why is she saying it.
Think about it.
