New Zealand Government To Snoop On E-mail

Hairy1 writes: "The New Zealand Government is planning to increase the powers of the police so they may intercept e-mail, according to the The New Zealand Herald. Paul Swain wants to exempt police from laws against hacking so they may snoop into emails. Read the story." "Recent history suggests the usual glib official assurances that such organisations and people will not be snooped on by state security and intelligence services will be worthless," the story quotes the spokesman for a group called Gatt Watchdog as saying, but insert-your-cause-here. Hard to watch just a few people's e-mail.

Comments

Why one should be worried about other countries

[rodgerd]

This is, of course, why people should be worried about what happens in other countries. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the US, smug Europeans tend to have a good laugh, and vice versa.

This is a perfect example of why such smugness is so dumb. Attempts to grant police more draconian powers in .nz are being justified with the UK RIP bill; no doubt people in the US will be unpleasantly surprised when the FBI justify Carnivore (and more) on the same grounds.

Once it is considered acceptable for one country to behave abhorrently, other governments will do the same. How often have you heard proponents of strong government point to Asian dictatorships like Singapore as evidence of what could be achieved by strong government unquestioned (and unquestionable) by the people?

we live in frightening times

[The_Messenger]

Goddammit, it seems like with every day that passes, we have less of an excuse not to encrypt interpersonal communictions. I'm surprised that businesses don't require employees to encrypt any mail that leaves the intranet.

• PGP international home
• Direct link for novices at PGP international home
• GNU Privacy Guard
• Using Mutt with PGP
• Info on one of the PGP plugins for MS Outlook

Fucking government assholes... if you weren't such snooping bastards, maybe I wouldn't feel it was necessary to ensure my privacy. My problem is that not-so-savvy friends and business associates require me to use cleartext e-mail. Ah, life is depressing...

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All generalizations are false.

Why new tech gets govt interest

[A nonymous Coward]

I believe it's just standard power control freak activity. Look at telephone wiretaps. I personally find them abhorrent, a violation of privacy, etc. Way too open to abuse. I don't even like the idea of police listening to closed doors. But I digress :-)

Think back to before the telephone. Criminals has to meet face to face or send letters, and I doubt letters did much for simple crime. Most likely, to organize a bank robbery or any kind of activity, they met face to face. The only way for police to listen in was informers in the meeting, or ear to the door. I doubt there was much ear to the door stuff, it would be too easy to prevent. So there wasn't a whole ot of police listening in on crooks.

Then along comes the phone. Crooks weren't stupid, they could see how they could get together for a combined effort so much easier with a few phone calls. Police recognized this too, but suddenly they had the *capability* of listening in without having to put their asses in danger from twitchy guards protecting the meeting. And just like nowadays, they conned a mostly ignorant public into going along with their plans, with much the same message -- the innocent had nothing to fear, there would be no abuses, etc.

IIRC wiretaps were originally thrown out of court until Congress passed some enabling legislation, which did not get completely smooth sailing. There was debate, but not enough. Probably a web search would refresh my memory, but I haven't a clue now where I read this, or how much I remember correctly.

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