The new Search and Surveillance Bill includes provisions to force people who own and manage computer systems to give full access to those systems. This includes the obligation to give up passwords to enable the authorities to access encrypted information.
Of course, this assumes that the person involved actually has the password. It’s quite common for someone running a system to not be able to break the encryption used by other users to secure their data. Will the courts understand that? And even if they understand that, will they believe it? Continue reading Updated: Jailing People for Remaining Silent→
New Zealand has sought a Free Trade Agreement with the United States for some time. As part of most trade agreements between much larger markets and smaller countries like New Zealand, the inevitable concessions are made by a smaller country for the longer-term gain in access to the market.
In the past, this was mostly around the timing of subsidies and the speed with which access to the market happened for each party. However, more recently the realm of Intellectual Property Rights have become a core part of the concessions a smaller country must make in order to do business with the United States. Continue reading IP: Singing from the same songbook→
Sometimes it seems that every day there is another threat to people’s abilities to use the Internet. Each special interest group has their own barrow to push, often with honourable intent, that causes them to make impossible or unreasonable demands.
Where an internet service provider or content host becomes aware that they are carrying or hosting information that they know is in breach of a suppression order, it should be an offence for them to fail to remove the information or to fail to block access to it as soon as reasonably practicable.
The government believes it has the power to intercept, search and block our communications – if they’re done over the Internet.
The media companies want to ignore the right to a fair trial and skip straight to the punishment phase – if you download music files instead of copying a CD.
Border agencies and the Police believe they have a right to unlimited access to your private data – but only if it’s on computer, not on paper.
The government wants to be able to punish others by disconnecting them from the Internet – but we wouldn’t ban people from using paper and pen.
There are those who think that they can ignore our existing rights and freedoms because new technology has made them obsolete.