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:7092] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Part 2 discusses consequential repeals and amendments relating to the matters that we have discussed. It summarises and implements many of the issues that have been traversed so far. 
One thing I want to talk about particularly is the provision to allow access to computers. I want to bring in the matter of the Privacy Commissioner’s concerns. The Privacy Commissioner presented a number of submissions to the Law and Order Committee on various matters in this bill and he was particularly concerned about our granting the law and intelligence authorities the right to access computers remotely—to hack into computers. His argument and I agree with it and it has motivated one of my amendments is that the police already have the power to look at the contents of a computer when they search a premises under a warrant so why do they need to go further and have remote access or hacking powers which are very hard for us to oversee in any serious way? It is very hard for the police to be fully publicly accountable for the exercise of those powers compared with the exercise of their powers under a search warrant to look directly at a computer and its contents. I support the Privacy Commissioner’s concern that that power should not be granted. 
He had other concerns. For example he did not want interception warrants to apply by way of the police just going to a judge and getting a warrant on a one-off basis. Different judges will be dealing with those warrants and he thought there should be an additional control as there is in Australia where the federal ombudsman does an annual audit of interception warrants granted to the police. I think we should have implemented that provision. It was one of the things that one of my amendments dealt with. It would have meant that we do what is done in Australia and have an extra layer of accountability—that is an ombudsman auditing those warrants. 
A concern expressed by the Privacy Commissioner and most of the submitters to the select committee was that we should try to protect innocent people as much as possible. There are two ways of doing that. One is to discard the information acquired from intercepts and that is covered by amendments in this bill that provide that when information is no longer needed it should be discarded. I put forward an additional provision in one of my amendments. My amendment would have meant that an innocent subject was notified once the police investigation was over and it was quite clear that the police no longer had any interest in that person. Where an innocent person had been accidentally caught up in the interception system and no charges were laid my amendment would have meant that that person was notified that an interception had taken place. 
That is what the FBI does in America. The Law and Order Committee received a submission from a person who lives here in Wellington that one of her emails to a friend in the United States had been intercepted by the FBI and the FBI had reported that fact to the recipient of her email. That is a good provision and it could have been added to this bill. Sometimes in later life in relation to later events people are affected by an interception because it resulted in their names ending up on a database. There is a looseness and a capacity for error in any bureaucratic system. If the agency—the FBI in the American case or the police in the New Zealand case—notifies a person that he or she was subject to an interception order then that person at a later point if his or her credit rating or travel or something else is being affected at least will know that he or she was subject to that interception warrant and might be able to get to the bottom of the disadvantage that he or she is suffering. I think it is consistent with the general privacy themes that operate in our law that people should be notified of what information about them appears in public databases. 
The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 84 in the name of the Hon Phil Goff to Part 2 be agreed to. 
Amendments agreed to.