Internet Surveillance Working Group Report 23/03/01

Report 23 March 2001

ISOCNZ asked to present its submission to the Crimes Amendment Bill #6 Select Committee, and was given the opportunity to do so on Thursday 15 March 2001, in a half-hour slot shared with the New Zealand Law Society. Our presentation immediately followed that of the Privacy Commissioner, and others speaking about the privacy concerns in the Bill, which provided useful background to our submission.

ISOCNZ's submission was presented by Ewen McNeill and David Zanetti, representing the ISWG, along with Sue Leader providing "official" representation of the Society. Peter Dengate-Thrush was unable to attend, as he was still out of the country. The ISWG prepared a single page bullet-point summary of what we considered to be the most important points from our submission, and copies of this were handed to the Select Committee members immediately prior to our presentation. A copy of that single page sheet is attached.

The New Zealand Law Society representatives spoke first, for about 5-10 minutes, covering 4 main points that they wanted to emphasise. We then covered the 6 points in our single page summary, expanding a little on the detail on the page. Then we opened the session up to questions.

Several of the Select Committee members had very insightful questions about our presentation and our submission; it was very pleasing to see that some of them had obviously read our submission in quite some detail. The questions covered a wide range of areas, with Committee members showing a particular interest in concerns about validity of evidence, and also the effects that encryption would have on intercepting evidence.

We think that they understood our point that encryption offers a practical way to gain privacy on the Internet, but obviously they are also concerned at the effect this might have on interception powers. We pointed out that even if the traffic is encrypted during transit, it is often readable on both the sender's computer and the recipient's computer.

One particularly insightful question linked the possibility of a virus or trojan on a computer with concerns about the validity of the evidence. This was a particular concern once we had explained how relatively easily nearly undetectable forgeries could be achieved on a computer network.

The session closed with both ISOCNZ and a representative from the New Zealand Law Society making the point that there is a need to distinguish between "what a computer did" and "what a person did", and a need to focus on the behaviour of people, rather than "interception devices" or other tools.

Overall I think the presentation went very well, with the shared session lasting about 30 minutes, of which ISOCNZ spoke for about 20-25 minutes (including answering questions). Almost all the questions that were asked during the session were directed to ISOCNZ, and we were able toexplain the technology (as simply as possible) to show the importance of the points we were making. In addition it was very pleasing to see that

Several of the Select Committee members had clearly spent considerable time learning about the area, and reading submissions, and were carefully thinking about the issues we had raised.

My only concern from the whole presentation was that the discussion focused almost entirely on email. I hope that this was merely a convenient metaphor for the discussion, rather than an indication that some Select Committee members see the Bill as applying only to email, as its application is considerably wider than email alone.

©2001 The Internet Society of New Zealand
Last updated 23 March 2001