Source: Radio New Zealand
The government has said the Bill would restore police powers rather than giving them new ones. File photo. RNZ / Richard Tindiller
The FBI could get hold of masses of personal information about New Zealanders, a lawyer has warned MPs.
The Justice Select Committee has been hearing submissions on the Policing Amendment Bill, which would extend police powers to gather intelligence and give them expanded powers to close down public places in case of actual or anticipated disorder.
But Lloyd Gallagher – from the Law Association’s technology and law committee – told MPs on Monday that the bill had too few protections around the data, especially with the spread of AI.
“With the collaboration that we’re now doing with the FBI etc internationally, we run a risk of that information no longer being able to be within our control,” said Gallagher.
“Once it’s in the US’s hands under the Patriot Act etc, there’s a massive amount of risk of that data being put into databases and miscommunicated.”
The government has said the bill would restore police powers rather than giving them new ones.
But most of the groups that appeared at the select committee rejected that and laid out fears this was police “over-reach” – that the Bill was too vague and broad; set few limits on collecting data or what the personal information could then be used for; and that it would undermine trust in police, especially among Māori and Pasifika.
“The Bill’s intelligence-gathering powers will have a far greater impact on the privacy interests of the community at large than any other kind of information-gathering power currently available to law enforcement agencies,” Nick Chisnall KC of the Law Society told MPs.
Thomas Beagle listed technologies the Council for Civil Liberties believed police would deploy much more if the bill passed – facial recognition, automated number plate recognition, drones, live surveillance and gate analytics.
“Everything’s allowed by this Bill.
“There are really no limits,” Beagle said. He said there was also no oversight or appeal rights for people targeted.
“The Bill embodies the view police will never misuse or abuse their powers.”
Retail NZ and the Police Association spoke up in support of the Bill’s two parts.
Retail NZ cited rising violence in stores, and the Police Association’s Steve Watt said it gave clarity and the right tools.
“Police will actually have a firmer idea of what and where they can do things as we progress into the future,” said Watt.
The Bill’s second part – which would introduce infringements and arrest powers when places were declared off-limits – would help keep people safe, Watt said.
But prison reformer Cosmo Jeffrey said the Bill lacked a framework to control how police used or retained people’s data – including their photographs, which could be used over and again in facial recognition systems.
He had been in Twizel on his Ducati recently when a patrol officer pulled him over, Jeffrey said.
“He asked for my licence. Within seconds he brought up my history, started talking about something that happened 25 years ago and I was left standing there wondering, ‘Haven’t I done time, shouldn’t I be allowed to get on with my life?’.
“And I’m just wary of collecting information on people that can be called up in seconds and used against them.”
The Bill was put together under time pressure and without public consultation, the documents allied to it said. The consultation of agencies such as the Justice Ministry and Te Puni Kokiri suggested more safeguards.
Māori were not consulted, even though the Bill was designed to give police “certainty” to take images of people in public again. A widespread practice before a 2020-22 investigation ruled it was unlawful and had especially targeted rangatahi.
Shaymaa Arif – from BIPOC Legal Collective Aotearoa – told the committee they must insist on the systemic oversight lacking from the Bill, “before another generation of tamariki end up in a database”.
“The people that are most impacted and affected by this bill are not in this room with us,” Arif said. “They are Māori teenagers, they are children of colour, they are whānau at Friday prayers.”
Police would combine the intelligence gathering and expanded closure powers to turn public gatherings into surveillance areas using facial recognition, she warned.
Anjum Rahman said the Bill was a push towards a US-style over-securitisation that had not worked to prevent gun violence over there, and would not work here. The over-securitisation of New Zealand mosques after the March 2019 did not make them safer, because a shooter could simply target people as they left, she said.
The “powers in this Bill will make that worse” and target political protesters, while other initiatives could build societal trust, she said.
Several submitters questioned why the Bill was so vague in not defining the “functions” and “activities” that police could use to justify taking photos or videos, or for the first time without a warrant being able to gather intelligence in a private place that was not related to why they were there in the first place.
It was “just bad law” to leave it up to junior officers to decide for themselves whether what they were doing was justified on the grounds the intel might come in useful even if only in future, said Craig Clarke of Community Law Centres Aotearoa.
Year 13 Wellington High student Miro Thomas Ireson asked the committee to at least require police to use dedicated surveillance devices and not their Apple iPhones, which he believed might expose people’s data to America’s Cloud and Patriot Acts.
John Gregson of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists called for an across-government assessment of how the Bill combined with move-on orders would impact the most vulnerable people. Mentally ill people would fall foul by behaving like they were resisting the officers who got to make the call on cementing their biometric data into the state system, he said.
Specific safeguards needed to be added, plus a full Te Tiriti assessment done.
However, as it stood, the Bill had “zero protections for tamariki”, he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand