Locke Keith: Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12282] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I would just like to follow up the exchange I have been having with Simon Power. He said that the Greens and I are out on a limb because our analysis of the situation differs from that of Australia Britain and the United States. To argue just on that basis—that because other bigger countries that we have had a longstanding— 
Simon Power 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I apologise to the member. I realise this is probably technically not a point of order but as a point of clarification I never mentioned the United States. I said Australia the UK and nine-tenths of the people in this Chamber. 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Can I just say to the member that that is out of order. There is a Speaker’s ruling about misrepresentation. If members feel they have been misrepresented in what is being said they can take a point of order at the end of the speech and clarify it. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: I take Mr Power’s clarification. If he did not refer to the United States I take that point but I think he has done so on other occasions and in general the people who run his line of argument pay great attention to what the United States Government says about these matters. One of the problems of this bill is that it is a bit of a reflex reaction to what other Governments are saying. We can even see it in the commentary: “The bill is similar to recent overseas legislation”—in Australia and the United Kingdom in particular. I think it is being driven by that rather than by any real domestic need. I explained the two terrorist incidents that have taken place in New Zealand one of them 20 years ago and one of them 19 years ago. There is no indication that we are under any particular threat at the present time and there is no objective reason from the point of view of dealing with terrorism for introducing this legislation at the present time. 
I think the downsides are much greater than the upsides. Even Mr Mark said that we wished to have privacy with our own cellphones and electronic communications. That is very important but if we want to have that privacy we should not give the power to intercept to secret organisations that are largely unaccountable in the way that the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau are. We might say that they would not affect us and that we can trust them but if we look around the world we see what has happened with intelligence agencies—their spying on dissidents of one type or another on a whole range of issues. Material has come out for instance on the way that the FBI and J Edgar Hoover spied on all kinds of people from different cultures: black activists Martin Luther King Charlie Chaplin Paul Robeson and all sorts of people. 
Hon Member 
: Commies. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: Well that was the problem. Everyone who was a dissenter was defined as a Commie and had to come before a committee and confess he or she was communist name friends and all the rest of it. People were naming other people who had no political background just to get off the hook. It was a very dangerous situation. We can say that that situation does not exist now and that Helen Clark or Don Brash would never do that sort of thing to us but we have to establish our legislation and the powers we give to intelligence agencies in particular such that they cannot be abused by a Government that has a rather vindictive approach to political dissenters. So we do not want to go down— 
Ron Mark 
: Don’t say that about Helen. It’s not nice. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: Mr Mark is casting aspersions against our Prime Minister there I think. But we do not want to go down that track of giving the agencies of Government those powers unnecessarily. 
The technology matter that Simon Power referred to is very important because it means two things. The first is that many people can be intercepted much more easily than in the past with letter opening and telephone tapping. It is actually the volume of those interceptions that creates a problem too. There might be one or two other people in New Zealand called Simon Power and one of them might have nefarious associations that show up in a big surveillance sweep—particularly when keywords come into it. Poor old Simon Power might be on some database because somebody up in Whakatane who has the same name has received an email from an Islamic person in Yemen—or possibly even two emails. That is double trouble—that Simon Power’s name would be put on a list and all sorts of things would flow from that. All that information is exchanged internationally so the wrong Simon Power could be put on a database in America.