Locke Keith: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 6) — In Committee Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 6) — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:7083] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The title of this bill relates to amendments to the Crimes Act. To justify that title these amendments should improve the ability of the New Zealand justice system to apprehend and convict criminals. Some of the provisions in the bill are good; they modernise the language and description of offences. One of the main features of the bill is the inclusion of a whole new category of offences that deal with people intercepting other people’s electronic communications and hacking into their computers or to use the correct terminology remotely accessing others’ computers. The bill makes it illegal to interfere with people’s conversations through listening devices by applying that to electronic interception or computer hacking. 
There would be a big privacy problem if we were to allow people to freely intercept others’ electronic communications and it is good that the bill addresses that. For example we do a lot on the Internet these days and increasingly we buy things on the Internet. So stopping people from intercepting our credit card numbers as they whizz around the Internet as part of that electronic commerce is a very good thing. The provision against hacking is good too. Although people sometimes glorify the successes of some hackers—there is sometimes a bit of a David and Goliath atmosphere with some hackers treating it as a sport to try to access the Pentagon or a big Government computer— 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: The title is a very narrow debate. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: Yes. I think it is important in this debate to see what has changed in terms of improving the ability to catch criminals in relation to hacking. Although hacking may have some popular appeal—and the people who do it for sport are usually snapped up by the security companies and end up on big salaries—for the ordinary person it is very upsetting to be hacked particularly if it affects one’s computer. So it is good that there is a provision here to make that illegal. 
Unfortunately the bill does give exemptions from those provisions to the police the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service and that is not in keeping with the theme of the title. Instead of improving our ability to apprehend lawbreakers we are giving those agencies the ability to affect in some way our privacy which is a right under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act that should be very much upheld in our society. No good reason is given in this bill for doing that and a lot of innocent people will get caught. Members should think about how many emails they receive in a week and in a year—it ends up being thousands and thousands—and if any one of the people who send those emails is intercepted under these provisions then a member’s communications will also be intercepted and could end up being affected in that way. 
I accept that there has to be a balance and sometimes we may give away to some extent the hard-won right to privacy if there is a very clear community gain. That is the real spirit of a crimes amendment bill but no one gave any statistics or anecdotal evidence to the Law and Order Committee through any stage of its consideration of this bill to show that we would catch many extra criminals through giving the police and the intelligence services that ability. We need such evidence if we are to give away our privacy in that respect. This bill is about the Crimes Act and about catching criminals and everyone knows that serious criminals can very easily avoid interception using code encryption and those sorts of things.