Robots afoot in the dead of night

Following the actions of the government we currently enjoy, another overfunded agency of the state has seen fit to possibly break the law. A $24M digital archive paid for by the NZ taxpayer. Haven't they heard of Google cache?

The National Library contracted a United States company to capture a "snapshot" of the Internet in New Zealand.

It did not notify website owners of the harvest because "it could not see a good way to do so without effectively becoming spammers"

Weren't there laws on spam passed recently for some very good reasons? Like agencies accessing and interfering with computers?

the library's decision to ignore the robots.txt protocol increased the amount of international traffic websites would have to pay for

Not good enough that a taxpayer sponsored government agency can bypass net etiquette, costing ISPs dearly for their own needs. But then, no different from the corrupt Liarbour-led government which too thinks itself above the law and can retrospectively right things.