Submission: Search & Surveillance Bill
Text of our submission to the Select Committee about the Search & Surveillance Bill. Or download the PDF version.
1. General comments about the S&S Bill
While we appreciate the proposed changes to the Bill, we still hold grave concerns about the general thrust of the Bill towards increased powers for search and surveillance.
We have the following comments on some of the issues raised by the Summary Departmental Report.
ACTA: Improving but problems remain
The ACTA treaty negotiation process is still going strong. The participants apparently feel pressured to finalise the agreement before the end of the year and have agreed to an extra negotiating round in Washington next week to help hurry things up.
The most recent leaked text shows that progress is being made on the details while some major disagreements (mainly around the scope of the agreement - should an anti-counterfeiting agreement also include patents and geographic indications) are yet to be resolved.
In our last summary article about ACTA we raised five issues where we thought that the treaty was a threat to justice and civil liberties.
Here we revisit them and find significant improvement in three of those issues and minor improvements in the other two.
Internet filtering – time to let it go?
It's been over 3 years since the Department of Internal Affairs started their internet censorship trials in New Zealand. Since then (data from June 29th 2010):
Sky Television: A takedown conversation
If you've read our article about Sky's takedown notices you might be interested to see what a Sky takedown letter looks like, complete with the follow-up conversation.
Sky’s Takedown Notices – Justice or Intimidation?
It's a pretty scary thing to receive a legal letter from the law firm of a large corporate, especially when they claim that you're in breach of their rights and then make a series of demands. Going to court is very expensive and even if you're in the right, do you have enough money to be a test case? If you lose you might end up not only having to pay your own costs but those of the company who sued you. The threat of legal action is pretty intimidating for most people.
Sky TV is currently sending such letters to a number of people (see an example here). These are their own paying customers, who just want to watch Sky TV on their home-made entertainment systems. So why is Sky doing it? Before we can answer that question we'll have to explain a little bit about electronic program guides.
Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
Jonathan Penney, the Cyberlaw Fellow at Victoria University gave a public talk about the idea of "internet as a right" and whether there is any basis for this in current New Zealand law.
He started by looking at s14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act. This is about freedom of expression:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
Flowcharts for the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
Chris Esther has created some useful flowcharts that help explain some of the processes included in the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill. He has very kindly allowed us to repost them here.
Privacy and Technology
A Tech Liberty representative spent two half days at a group discussion about privacy and technology.
Here are some of the things that were discussed:
Submission – Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
Text of our submission to the Select Committee about the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill. Or download the PDF version.
Subscribe
Recent Posts
- Submission: Search & Surveillance Bill
- Dissent, the internet and freedom
- ACTA: Improving but problems remain
- Internet filtering – time to let it go?
- Sky Television: A takedown conversation
- Sky’s Takedown Notices – Justice or Intimidation?
- ACTA: Say hello to statutory damages
- Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
- Flowcharts for the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
- Privacy and Technology
- Submission – Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
- Technology unveils past secrets
Dissent, the internet and freedom
Tech Liberty was formed because a group of us were concerned that governments were ignoring traditional civil liberties when it came to new technology. The New Zealand government had recently passed a digital copyright law that would see people punished without due process and were secretly introducing a new internet censorship regime. We decided that we needed to stick up for the civil liberties that underpin our democracy and keep our society healthy.
A recent article by Rob Weir does a good job of articulating what drives us. In How to Crush Dissent, he compares distributing information on the internet to the samizdat underground presses in the Eastern Bloc. He fears that our current anarchic level of information freedom could be temporary: