Old and New Spies
The revised spying bill became law in New Zealand on the 21st of August. Labour and the Greens have promised to repeal the legislation if they capture the Treasury benches in 2014. A local
blogger has helpfully completed a comparison/contrast chart between the legislation it replaced and new amendments.
The old legislation was drafted in haste by the Labour government (with concurrence from other parties) whilst the threat of planes flying into buildings was a decided risk. It was during that mad time when not enough was known about Islamic terrorist groups and their methodologies, tools, and techniques. Therefore, the risks were larger in the popular imagination than in reality. Legislation drafted in fear and passed in haste is usually rued by those suffering the indignity of having to submit to it. So it was in this case. It turned out lawyers could not understand parts of it; the text of the law was equivocal in others, contradictory in yet other places. As a consequence, the Government Communications and Security Bureau (our version of the National Security Agency ["NSA"] in the United States) subsequently broke the law, apparently because it mis-interpreted it.
The new legislation tidies a lot of that up, removing confusion. In addition, and most importantly, the replacement legislation contains far more checks and balances than Labour's panicked legislation back in 2003. It is thus a far better piece of law. Citizens in the US must be green with envy when they compare and contrast our legal protections with those which don't exist in the United States.
