Goff Phil: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — Referral to Law and Order Committee Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — Referral to Law and Order Committee Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13854. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): This legislation the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill as I foreshadowed in the first reading of the bill shows all the signs of being rushed being ill-conceived and lacking proper consultation. We saw that with major changes made at the Law and Order Committee. The authors of the bill seemed to imagine that they could order the network providers to decrypt communications carried over their networks for which they never had the keys for the decryption to take place. They had to back off that. The authors of this bill and the Government seemed to think that they could order companies that were not domiciled in New Zealand to follow our law as against the conflict with the laws in their country of origin. They had to admit that and back off that.They made changes in the select committee but I woke up this morning and read theDominion Post to find that another major change has been made at the eleventh hour coming inin the Minister Amy Adams’s Supplementary Order Paper 366 and that is that clause 39 will now be removed. That is the clause that allows the Government to block an overseas company from offering services in New Zealand if it lacks interception capability. What is the cause of that? That change in that Supplementary Order Paper has been made outside of the select committee process. It has been made in a private deal between the Minister and some of the big companies. We have not been given an explanation and we should be given an explanation as to why the Government members on the select committee were ordered to stand behind that clause all the way through the discussions to die in a ditch for the Government’s stand on it only to have the rug pulled out from under their feet and to have that clause changed at the eleventh hour. Does that sound to you like legislation that is properly thought through properly worked out and introduced in the right way?Do you know how it was introduced? It was tabled one day and it came in under urgency the very next day. It was rammed through the House under urgency. And then the Government referred it to a select committee but it did not give the normal period of time on a particularly complex and controversial piece of legislation for those making submissions to put those submissions together and for the committee to properly consider the bill and analyse its shortcomings and its lack of safeguards. This legislation in a word is a shambles and it is shown by the Minister’s act this very day in reversing a stance that her lobby-fodder MPs on the committee supported all the way through to deliberation.It is serious that any legislation be handled in this way but it is particularly serious when you have a piece of legislation that confers major powers on to a Government to intrude on the privacy of New Zealanders and to direct private companies as to how they should operate. This bill for example requires companies to notify theGovernment Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) about any procurement that they might make. And is the company expected to sit back and wait until it gets approval from the Government whose time frame might be quite unreasonable and might hold up the process of the change that the network provider needs to make? This bill allows the Minister to direct industry to take actions or to desist from taking actions without the adequacy of the safeguards put into the English legislation dealing with security where you at least had an advisory board where somebody knew the technical details the implications and the consequences of what the Minister was doing. Too often we have seen in this House that the Minister him or herself will not understand these technicalities or those implications. We saw that from the Minister of Education at question time today. We needed adequate time to analyse this legislation but theGovernment insisted on ramming it through its first reading under urgency and curtailing the time that people had to make submissions and that the committee had to consider those submissions.The other big worry about this legislation is that it might simply provide the mechanisms for the intrusion on privacy but what it does is it actually implements a huge policy change made in a related piece of legislation the Government Communications Security Bureau Act. That legislation was changed also under urgency by the Government in order to give this agency for the first time in its history the right to spy on New Zealanders. And it did so without even considering—Hon Steven Joyce: You’re making it up.Hon PHIL GOFF: —holding an independent public inquiry which was the first thing Mr Joyce that the Australians did when they were introducing their legislation that gave powers to intrude on the privacy of individuals. They held an inquiry and by God we needed an inquiry because this legislation and its associated bill came about because of abuse of power by the GCSB. They came about because there are not sufficient safeguards on how the GCSB exercises its authority. In our fraternal parliaments in Australia Canada and the United Kingdom they do not put the Minister in charge of the agency on the committee that oversees that. They keep Ministers off. But we have our Prime Minister chairing the Intelligence and Security Committee setting the agenda and very rarely calling it together and we call that a safeguard against the abuse of powers of the GCSB.We opposed the Government Communications Security Bureau Act and therefore we oppose this legislation which enables it to be implemented. I will remind the House that the Government Communications Security Bureau Act was passed on the vote by the narrowest of margins by two votes from two members who are widely regarded by the public as being discredited.We have not got the safeguards and we know from what is happening internationally that this sort of legislation needs proper safeguards. We have had the revelations from the leaks by Edward Snowden the man who showed that the American National Security Agency was actually spying on hundreds of thousands of American citizens not just citizens who had any association with terrorist or criminal organisations. Actually it was the Government Communications Headquarters in the United Kingdom revealed in the same leaks that was spying on friendly allied countries. We need the safeguards in the companion legislation or this legislation will not do.It is a fact that almost every submission before the Law and Order Committee on this legislation opposed it. Vodafone Telecom the Telecommunications Users Association of New ZealandInternetNZ Google Facebook Tech Liberty the New Zealand Law Society Microsoft and Mega—every one of those agencies said that this is ill-conceived legislation that will not do what it is meant to do. Let me make this point: we had the officials admit to us that loopholes will prevent this legislation even doing what the Government members have claimed for it. There is a loophole whereby over-the-top providers likeSkype—and more and more people are usingSkype—are not covered by this legislation and a loophole that says that small telecommunications companies are exempt. They are massive loopholes that professional terrorist and criminal organisations will use. We will not be catching the crooks but we will be locking up in the data gathering tens of thousands of innocent New Zealanders who will be spied upon and whose data will be collected.In the last minute that I have—I think it is about a minute—I just want to say this. The submission from Google said that given the short time available on the bill it was unable to analyse it properly but it did say that “The lack of transparency involved inthe various processes under the Bill would likely raise public fears of unjustified intrusion into their privacy.” It said that the additional costs in time and the challenges imposed by the bill will discourage local and international entities from making new service offerings available in New Zealand and also lead to existing agencies withdrawing services. This is bad legislation introduced under bad process and Labour is opposing it.