I spy with my 5 Eyes, something beginning with 1984: NZ Deep State fishing expedition must be stopped now
This Departmental turf war fiasco that has been fought silently behind the scenes where the Independence of the Department of Statistics will be breached by allowing their data collection to be accessed by the State Intelligence Apparatus has reached boiling point and the Council of Civil Liberties have made their position on the Bill devastatingly clear…
Briefing on the Data and Statistics Bill
The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties is opposed to the Data and Statistics Bill and wants it withdrawn. Once in a generation law reform, on a topic that needs all-party support to have credibility, should be developed collaboratively to ensure public confidence. The Bill does not need to pass now, so public consultation should take place on a draft Bill.
The bottom line is that this Bill dangerously conflates collection and use of data for the purpose of official statistics with collecting and sharing data for unspecified research.
While amendments described in this briefing can be made to the Bill to remove this second purpose and limit it to Statistics New Zealand’s statistics functions, overall it would be safer to withdraw this Bill and re-start the work by splitting the two purposes into separate legislation.
The Council believes legislation for this second purpose, possibly drawing on the Australian Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022, must be developed in an open and inclusive manner, including public consultation on an exposure draft of the Bill prior to its introduction to the House.
…there is no way this can be allowed to happen. Melding Department Statistics into the Mass Surveillance nexus is a bewilderingly dangerous increase in power that has no checks and no balances.
The NZ Deep State Spiders are already quietly spinning insidious Face Recognition surveillance while our attention is distracted by Covid and are frightened by extremism…
Drivers’ licence photos will not be run through the One Time Identity facial recognition system unless a person chooses it, the Transport Agency says.
Waka Kotahi has created an interface with the OTI system being developed since 2019 by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), to enable access to drivers’ photos for COVID-19 records.
Waka Kotahi said it was for the vaccine passport.
…this is all Wellington bureaucrat white noise arse covering. What the Deep State Spiders want here is access to the Driver Licence database that will give enormous real time mass surveillance powers to the Police.
Right now, the NZ Police are using mass surveillance facial recognition software from an Orwellian company that illegally sources photos without any sign off from the Privacy Commissioner or their own Police Boss!
Police held a ‘stocktake’ of these types of unapproved face recognition software trials and lo and fucking behold the Police quietly admit to a $9million face recognition network they are setting up with zero oversight from the Privacy Commissioner???
Police setting up $9m facial recognition system which can identify people from CCTV feed
Police have been quietly setting up a $9 million facial recognition system that can take a live feed from CCTV cameras and identify people from it.
This would push New Zealand into new territory for tracking citizens.
It will be run by a non-police contractor – US firm Dataworks Plus – and collect 15,000 facial images a year, with that expected to expand up to 10-fold.
Their latest move is to create some fake watchdog panel over mass surveillance powers that no on gave them!
The duplicitous and underhand manner in which the NZ Police have quietly amassed a mass surveillance network alongside their constant abuse of power to get what they want is an incredibly dangerous combination for any State Agency to gain.
The National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism could expand the number of people the State categorise as a threat and justify real time face recognition mass surveillance.
Because The National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism are staffed by woke warriors, the Left seem obvious to the potential misuse ion these vast powers.
What happens if the appointed woke warriors, after providing political cover to expand vast mass surveillance over white supremacy Nazis get replaced if the Government changes?
Are we sure we know what level of power we are blithely handing over here?
A Police State starts with the promise of security.
We can’t seriously allow the important data the Department of Statistics gathers for us to be abused by over zealous state security services can we?
Can we?
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We already live in a surveillance state with many private businesses deploying highly sophisticated systems of facial ID. Most Pak’n Save stores have systems equal to that of a Las Vegas Casino. I don’t like the idea of more and I am deeply uneasy about the state rolling out what they want to implement.
The challenge, at least to my mind, is how to balance our societal desire for safer communities (together…) against privacy for the individual.
I can see the police rushing everything out once a nice white middle class kid gets the bash in central Auckland or a fat American cruise liner tourist gets brutally mugged on their way back from commercial bay as there will be a cacophony of calls for the city centre to be fully monitored and before we know it it’ll be minority report in the CBD.
The police already can’t manage Auckland and don’t have enough staff or funding so this is a very neat solution. ID the scumbags before they do anything and then deploy a unit to harass and follow said scumbag until he slopes off to somewhere with no cameras – ie, away from the nice places and back to the shitholes where they can cause all the grief they want as it’s out of sight and out of mind
Middle NZ will think it’s wonderful without realising they’re also being watched. All the time.
It’s already bloody close. Every single NZTA and regional council ‘safety camera’ in the country is already running automatic number plate recognition shared with the cops without even a warrant, and they aim to put cameras near any public transport too.
It seems that our NZ politicians are enslaved and cowards afraid to push back at the neoliberal regime they have imposed on us. Labour was full of hubris at bringing in something that they knew National would want – they stole a march on National and I suppose that Treasury whispered in their ears that it would be financially worthwhile for them, and enable them to stay in power two times out of three which was a win on past performance.
So dare they come off their pedestal where they stand isolating themselves from people below that their acts of wilful blindness have caused to grow in their minds to be monsters. They feel uneasy and step back from the people they are supposed to care about fearing reaction from those they consider ‘the other’. It is Dorian Gray territory here. They need to appeal to the idea of the five million team, that brought forward the spirit that has perhaps been dormant. And they need to meet with us regularly and show that they are trying to meet the needs of all the people,. The ‘others’ will fade away.
But if Labour enables a group with poisoned minds, fearful and shaped by their own twisted perceptions, they will find what they seek. They will find those who don’t align precisely to laws of unreason and demolish our opportunity to shape our country to enable people of goodwill to face and deal with fairly and competently, the many difficulties, human and environment thundering down on us.
Dare they put forward informed professionals with advanced political and economic and humanities education and experience, whose minds are wide, whose vision is great, including peripheral, and who understand themselves and the country and its cultures, who meet and discuss widely with the public and listen to form good policies and plans to suit our deteriorating conditions, and draw us into a true, working democracy. Go for the 90% that aren’t stuck in their own honeypot of riches. Don’t attempt to fool the public and weave phantasmagorian lies about subversives or terrorists by hitting out at anyone who expresses a criticism or a new idea. When we voted Labour we didn’t expect the Kiwi Inquisition! We wanted politicians who equal the All Blacks who play a hard but good game but not just to win at any cost.
State Surveillance seems one of the most resistant subjects to public interest let alone action by large numbers of the people.
Back in analogue days the SIS Amendment Bill did attract significant public protest in 1977, the bill made it unlawful to publish the names of SIS employees and operatives.
Fast forward to 2010 and National’s New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill which apart from showering the state snoops with several hundred million dollars in budget increases, granted anonymity for life to operatives, and extended unwarranted surveillance and spying/bugging powers to many other ministries–hardly a peep from the public.
Photo Driver licences saw people flocking to the malls to get theirs done, a hard core resisted like a mate of mine did for two years, but the fines and harassment got to him in the end.
Yet come the existential threat of COVID and a significant section of crazies did publicly kick back against mandates and vaccination–so go figure.
There are plenty of non-woke leftists blithely turning a blind eye to the dangerous power grabs this Labour-led government continues to roll out.
The idea of this being about the different government departments with the government ”innocently” obeying their dictates is part of the deception. Are they supposed to be woefully ignorant as well as devoid of moral principle?
This pattern has been emerging for a while now. I wonder how extreme and obvious it has to become.
Worse yet, anything handed over the GCSB/SIS will go straight to foreign enemies of our nation like the US and Australia under the 5 perving eyes agreement.
Under the already existing ‘Gang Intelligence Centre Approved Information Sharing Agreement’, if your IRD auditor feels that you were rude to them and claim you threatened to sik the Mob on them, or your girlfriend’s Housing New Zealand rep thinks it’s convenient to get her kicked out of some nice old Auckland state house they consider prime for sale to developers by claiming you’re an associate of Black Power, all without any further supporting information, that claim goes straight to the Police Gang Intelligence Centre and colours all further interactions that you have with Police and more than ten other agencies.
Same deal as when Mr. Bradbury had the police lie about him, pretending he was some evil superhacker, except now with the GIC it’s not just cops but random social workers and IRD call centre staff that can put the bad word on you. But if this Data and Statistics Bill insanity goes through it will be every single public servant in New Zealand and all our ‘overseas partners’ that can put the good old black spot on you, and it won’t even end if you leave the country.
Watch a majority Labour govt pass the necessary amendments under urgency and weep.
O
You fix this I’m coming back to NZ permanently like every other sane kiwi living abroad.
Would.
‘The two new police advisers are technologist Andrew Chen of the University of Auckland and Associate law Professor Nessa Lynch at Victoria University.’
I have no doubt Mr Chen and Ms Lynch are thoroughly capable researchers however, after six months anything they say or do will be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and there will be no coming back from the trans-humanist path so eagerly trodden by the deluded, myself included.
This bill is an abomination, anyone supporting it likewise
here is the 5eyes catch22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Goq3mF43BuE