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The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties is opposed to the Data and Statistics Bill and wants it withdrawn.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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