Curran Clare: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 16 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13946. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I want to give a bit of an introduction to Part 1 of the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill to the bill in general and to where Labour stands on this which is strongly opposed to this bill in its entirety but certainly starting off with our reasons for opposition to Part 1. This bill as we know replaces the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act of 2004. It is certainly needed and there is justification for an updating and a modernisation of this legislation. One of the things this bill does is it adds a new component to this piece of legislation. It is called “security”.This bill is problematic for numerous reasons. It is the companion bill to or the facilitating bill of the changes that this Government pushed through under the Government Communications Security Bureau Act. That bill failed to provide enough protections for New Zealand citizens’ privacy. We contend that this bill certainly reinforces that but also fails to take into account economic issues the costs to New Zealand telecommunications and technology companies and also the issues of data security and the rights of those companies.This is a very one-sided bill. It involves a major expansion of Government powers over network providers through the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and through providing extensive and unprecedented powers to Ministers in different parts of this bill. It gives Ministers extraordinary powers in some cases without precedent in New Zealand. We will certainly have more to say on that as we go through the different parts of this bill. It creates broad sweeping powers. It increases the role of the GCSB overall—its role in the decisions by network operators and the information that must be provided to them.This bill we contend was not well drafted. We say that in all seriousness. We say that knowing that in general much of the legislation that comes before this House has been well drafted and a lot of thought and attention has gone into it. Our contention is that the concerns of submitters the concerns of industry and the concerns of civil society have been ignored pretty much during the course of the bill going through the Law and Order Committee. We think that there are serious issues in definitions. Certainly in Part 1 we are addressing that.Today we have tabled in the Chamber Supplementary Order Paper 370 which contains 10 amendments to this bill. Four of those relate to Part 1 and we will be addressing them as we go through the discussion today. The Law and Order Committee did make some changes to limit and clarify powers and processes but we believe that they were not enough. There was a last-minute Supplementary Order Paper 366 from the Minister for Communications and Information Technology which has left manymany questions around what the implications of that are. There has been an inability to discuss that and seek advice on those matters in the select committee. There was an attempt to refer this bill back to the select committee yesterday which naturally failed but as a result we therefore do not know what the impact of the Minister’s last-minute Supplementary Order Paper actually is.Part 1 includes the interpretation clause which several of Labour’s Supplementary Order Paper amendments relate to. I will quickly run through what they are. They deal with and relate to clause 3 in Part 1 firstly deleting the definition of “national security”. This is important. There were many submissions and there has been much discussion around this part of the bill because this definition of national security includes a concept called “economic well-being”. As I said earlier there are a number of things that are unprecedented in this bill and this concept of economic well-being is one of them which has not been anywhere in this bill spelt out as to how it relates to national security what that means what factors are taken into account when those decisions are being made—that national security is important—and how economic well-being fits in with all of that. Our remedy for this is to delete this clause altogether because it is essentially meaningless and it creates more questions than it answers. So we have put a Supplementary Order Paper forward to delete that particular definition which is on page 10 of the version of the bill that I have in front of me. By removing the term “economic well-being” if we attempted to do it that way it would make the clause redundant so we believe that the best remedy is to actually delete the whole of that sentence altogether.The second amendment that we are proposing is to amend the definition of “network operator”. There is going to be a lot of discussion about that particular issue as we traverse this bill today because of the enormous wide definition of “network operator” and the potential for encompassing so many different organisations and entities in New Zealand particularly. There are two issues there and two clauses here that we are going to amend. One is the definition of “network operator” and the other is the definition of “service provider”. Both again create more problems than they solve in attempting to deal with the intent of this bill. It is our contention that they must be amended. During the select committee process we ended up with a wider version of “service provider” and it has made the issue much more complex.In our amending of “network operator” we say that the bill as drafted places onerous obligations on network operators and may capture many who were not be intended to be caught. This is the same with the definition of “service provider”. Our contention is that we should return the clause to the one that was originally introduced into the select committee. As has been discussed in recent days the revised definition of “service provider” now potentially includes anyone outside New Zealand who makes a telecommunications service available in New Zealand. On the one hand you have got a definition of “network operator” that could potentially apply to every website operating in New Zealand that has a communication with members of the public. The definition of “service provider” could capture anyone outside New Zealand who makes a telecommunications service available in New Zealand. It is our belief that this was not and should not be the intent of the bill and therefore we say that that should be amended.Finally we are inserting a new definition of “surveillance agency” which clarifies that this term applies only to New Zealand agencies. Again the discussion in the select committee was very unclear on this matter. It is our fear that it was meant to be wider than that. I would like to hear from the Minister her view during the course of this discussion on whether that was her intention. Was it meant that the definition of“surveillance agency” was to include only New Zealand - based agencies or was it meant to be a much broader definition?We have 10 different amendments to discuss during the course of this bill. These particular four relate to Part 1. They are core to the whole bill because everywhere that those terms are used—