Original articles by Tech Liberty
New Zealand is one of the four original members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement. Other countries (Australia, the USA, Peru and Vietnam) are now interested in joining the agreement. It is referred to as both TPP and TPPA.
This FAQ answers some of the frequently asked questions about the TPP. It was last updated on 16th May 2011.
Contents:
The Search and Surveillance Bill is an attempt to rewrite New Zealand’s laws around search and surveillance.
One thing that has become clear in the debate around the bill is that many people are not fully aware of the existing powers that government agencies have to pry into our personal affairs. It’s not uncommon for someone to decry a ‘new’ power in the Search and Surveillance Bill, only to be told that it is already in existing law.
This article lists, to the best of our knowledge, the current ways that the government can use to watch us. We will expand/correct it as additional knowledge comes to light.
This article has not yet been updated to reflect the changes made when the Search & Surveillance Act became law.
The Ministry of Economic Development recently asked for submissions on the topic of digital enforcement in the ACTA treaty. We submitted a submission, as did 33 other organisations and individuals.
We requested copies of them under the Official Information Act; here they are in PDF format (we’ll do another post with the earlier submissions):
Continue reading ACTA Submissions 2010
Update on internet filtering including which ISPs will filter, more information from the DIA, and links to the Australian anti-filtering campaign.
Continue reading Internet filtering update
The ACTA countries have agreed to release the draft ACTA text after the latest round of talks conclude in Wellington.
This is an important victory for the principles of open democracy – our government shouldn’t be negotiating treaties in secret that take away our rights.
Continue reading First battle won – ACTA text to be released
It’s going to be a week of ACTA in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Ministry of Economic Development asked for submissions about the Digital Enforcement Provisions in the ACTA treaty.
While we object to New Zealand’s participation in the treaty, we still thought it was worthwhile to respond. The full text follows (headings correspond to those in the request for submissions), but the 8 recommendations we made are:
Continue reading Submission about Digital Enforcement Provisions in ACTA
With the leak of the full text of ACTA, complete with every nuance of positions by the various countries involved, we have the first full and complete picture of what our government is up to.
Here’s five things we learnt from reading the treaty.
Continue reading Five New Things About ACTA
We’ve written about the unhealthy secrecy around the ACTA treaty negotiations. As New Zealanders we believe we have a right to know what our government is doing on our behalf.
We wrote to the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to ask them some questions about ACTA under the Official Information Act. We just got our answers back (scanned PDFs of the MED letter – 3MB, MFAT letter – 3MB, and cabinet paper – 6MB) and we have to admit that we weren’t very surprised to see more excuses not to release official information than we saw information.
Continue reading ACTA – The NZ Official Information Requests
Last week we announced that the New Zealand internet filter had “gone live” and was now being used to filter the connections for users of two ISPs (Watchdog and Maxnet), with more expected to follow.
The obvious question has to be, why was Tech Liberty announcing something that the Department of Internal Affairs had done? Where was their announcement that the filter had gone live on the 1st of February? Don’t civil servants have a duty to communicate to the people that they serve?
Continue reading Department of Internal Affairs failing on open government