Delahunty Catherine: Electronic Data Safety Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Electronic Data Safety Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2391. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): It is good to speak in favour of this bill. I would like to acknowledge Clare Curran for her efforts on behalf of us all actually because it is actually really important that we all have a level of protection that currently does not exist. There is this sorry list of privacy breaches in the State sector that need to be rectified. We are in a brave new world but it is not very brave or satisfactory for many people whose privacy details have been exposed through a number of debacles and breaches. In fact when the last speaker Judith Collins was speaking about nasty little hackers I thought she was talking about Cameron Slater who does actually fulfil that criterion of being quite an unpleasant person in the way he talks about other people. I am going to defend the right of people to talk about important issues. I do think that Nicky Hager is a citizen who brings issues into the light which is quite different from exposing privacy. We actually need to know what is going on in our country. We need journalists who can do that. We also need protection and that is why this bill is important. The vulnerable who are in a relationship with the State with the private details of their own very personal—sometimes—circumstances need protection.The Electronic Data Safety Bill establishes a special commission of inquiry and it was inspired by the Ministry of Social Development kiosk privacy breach. I think we were all pretty horrified at the ease with which Keith Ng was able to access this through a very simple system basically through an open file. I have some sympathy for people working in Government departments who make mistakes with technology. I am sure that if I worked there I would be one of those people. But what we need is rigorous oversight and excellent modern systems and we need to have a commission such as is suggested here to really set up a decent framework so that this cannot keep happening to ordinary people. I am speaking here not as an expert on this technology who is definitely Gareth Hughes and not myself; I am speaking here as the human rights spokesperson because actually the human rights of citizens who are engaging with departments such as the Ministry of Social Development Work and Income and ACC really need to know that when they sit in a room and tell someone a story about themselves and give their very personal and sometimes extremely traumatising details to that person—whether it is at Work and Income or ACC—those details will actually stay private. Those very personal traumatic stories that people find it hard enough to tell in order to get some support that the State should actually support them with—if they then become part of the public domain it is very very scary.What was scary about what happened with the Ministry of Social Development was that it had an utterly inadequate process in place. It was not protecting the confidential details. The full names of children for example in the high and complex needs programme were exposed and I do not see how that is beneficial to those children let alone the rest of us. There was a list exposed of everyone who owed the ministry money which is pretty extraordinary because it is so easy to make assumptions about this kind of stuff without knowing the background and there were addresses for their family homes in care protection facilities for the Child Youth and Family Services homes. That is the kind of information that in the wrong hands is really damaging. Also although there was an independent investigation by Deloitte and it found some pretty serious things that was not really sufficient. It was damning about governance and it showed that security was not being consistently considered.The investigation also showed that some more investigation was needed and that privacy breaches were pervasive across Government departments. Which Government departments you might ask? Well I have mentioned the Ministry of Social Development and ACC. In respect of ACC in particular 6500 client details were able to be accessed and those are people who have been victims of not just accidents at work in the conventional sense but sexual violence—people who have experienced extremely traumatic experiences. Novopay was also another one. Teachers’ details were available to previous employers and to other schools. There is a proper process for that; it is called the Teachers Council. But this was actually through insufficient internet care insufficient protection. And then of course there was Work and Income. To add to that there was the Earthquake Commission. There were breaches exposing thousands of client details. In the Ministry for the Environment it was 150 clients’ private email addresses. I could go on and on but the Assistant Speaker is indicating that I should not. We support this bill because this stuff is rife it is rampant it is not OK and we need to do something about it. So we support Clare Curran’s efforts.