25 February 2016
Two reports
caught my eye this week. First was the Amnesty International Report on Human
Rights in New Zealand, and the second was the report of the Family Violence
Review Committee on the state of domestic violence in New Zealand.
Amnesty
International was critical of a number of aspects of human rights in New
Zealand, particularly around the numbers and treatment of refugees, and also
relating to aspects of our surveillance policies, in particular the “full take”
approach we apparently adopt with regard to Pacific states.
The Family
Violence Review Committee report highlighted the unacceptably high level of
domestic violence in New Zealand, and called for all relevant government and
non-government agencies to work more effectively and collaboratively towards
its resolution.
While at first
glance these reports may appear to have little in common there is a link
between them. It relates to the vexed question of information-sharing. On the
one hand, according to Amnesty International, we are insufficiently
discriminating when it comes to gathering (and presumably sharing) intelligence
information on our Pacific neighbours. Debate about the scope and implications
of "“full take” information gathering policies has led the United States
to modify its approach in the last couple of years, with Congress placing new
restrictions on such practices, even if the FBI is now trying to subvert those
in its current bullying of Apple over access to encrypted mobile phone data.
On the other
hand, the Family Violence Review Committee report calls for greater
co-operation between agencies, including more information-sharing. And this is the
point of connection between the two reports.
There is a strong
case for better information-sharing between agencies, when it is in the
individual citizen’s interests. There is an arguable case for
information-sharing when it might assist the identification of at-risk
families, or aid the investigation and prevention of crime. (The jury is still
out on where the boundary-line is to be drawn in these cases, between the
mechanisms to be adopted, and the rights of the individual protected.) But
there is no case at all on human rights and individual privacy grounds for any
continuation of “full take” data-collection and information-sharing, especially
when that involves data collected about other countries.
People expect
governments to share information between agencies when it is in their
individual interests, but they also expect governments to treat such
information with due care, and to never forget that they are but the custodians
of an individual’s information. It is never the government’s information, but
is always that of the individual citizen, and must be respected as such. It
goes without saying that it should only be used for the purposes for which it
was gathered.
One way of
resolving this inherent conflict might be to do what happens in Estonia. There,
citizens have the right to see at any time who has been accessing their
personal data. If that access is deemed inappropriate, strict criminal penalties
apply. As a consequence, there have been extremely few privacy breaches. Maybe,
we should be looking to implement such a protection here?