Radio NZ’s Mediawatch podcast featured a couple of excellent interviews — with Jim Tucker and David Fisher. As is my habit, I listened to it on my walk this morning. Available here (35’27”). I recommend you listen to it.
Later on my walk, as I carefully picked my way around the coast at low tide, I popped on Leonard Cohen’s Dear Heather album, and found myself reflecting on the lyrics of this song in the context of the privacy invasions suffered at Government hands by journalist Andrea Vance & MP Peter Dunne.
Nobody should have the right to read their correspondence without their consent.
Note: Some audio distortion in this clip, but I like the lyrics and its atmosphere. – P
I am just curious. Was Peter Dunne using a parliamentary email address? You know – like a work email address? Because i was always told when employed at businesses that provided me a work email address that the emails were company property – not personal – and anyone could read them.
Anyone?
Hmm, I wouldn’t think it would be that loose, but I take your point.
I’d expect Peter Dunne’s address was his parliamentary one, but
Andrea Vance’s was her employer’s Fairfax …
Hi Jackie,
I wouldn’t have thought that the usual employer’s right to view work emails would apply in Peter Dunne’s situation.
Parliamentary Services run the parliamentary email and phone systems, but Peter Dunne isn’t employed by Parliamentary Services. They’ve got no ability to hire and fire MPs; they’re there almost as an IT department…
So in their role of providing support to MPs, they have the ability to view emails, but not necessarily the right. Which means that when they simply downloaded Mr Dunne’s emails and sent them off to the Henry Inquiry, they were acting well outside the scope of their role.
As to Andrea Vance, and the ability of her employers to view her emails? Good question. I’d be interested to know how news corporations structure their employment agreements, with regards to being able to access their reporters’ email systems. After all, reporters seem to be given carte blanche to conceal the nature and names of sources from even their own bosses, but I’d have no idea whether that’s a Chinese Wall that is informal or based on a written contract.
For instance, a contractual agreement preventing the employer from accessing certain types of email might be an extra layer of protection for a news organisation, if a Court were to direct that organisation to provide details naming a source. The company could then presumably tell the Court, “Well, we’d love to, but we don’t know, and we’ve got no legal right to access that reporter’s email”. Thus, the company could conceivably avoid the gun, should the reporter refuse to provide the Court with the directed information…
Any thoughts, Peter? You’d know rather more about that than I would!
As a journalist I have concealed the identity of sources from my employers for the sources’ protection.
I have also been mindful when using a news organisation’s email system that a systems administrator (at say, Mediaworks) might read it, or be asked by company management to turn over my emails and archives for examination … for whatever reason, with or without my permission.
I’ve always used my own cell-phone rather than a company-provided one, and liberally used it, rather than company phones to contact sensitive sources. I use text messages and iMessages (Apple’s supposedly encrypted end-to-end ‘secure’ alternative to SMS).
So, like a lot of other journos and ex-journos, I was a little gobsmacked to see this: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10907972
… especially this:
I am absolutely certain that Mansfield is not the only lawyer to communicate sensitive information with his clients via SMS/text message. (I can say that because I’ve had privileged information about a legal case communicated to me by SMS by my lawyers Simpson Grierson.)
Now, sure, Vodafone had a search warrant served on them… but in granting that search warrant did the judge expect that police would be scanning legally privileged communications on their trawl through Ambrose’s 300+ text messages? (Messages they could only tell WERE privileged by reading them?)
Pretty dubious.
And, all the more so because, like the ‘inquiry’ launched by John Key into Andrea Vance’s scoop re the early release of the to-be-released-a-short-time-later-anyway Kitteridge Report, the motivating factor for the police investigation was the prime minister’s vexation and embarrassment.
– P
It is all very interesting isn’t it? Thanks for the explanation Jay.
Peter – re the Ambrose tapes; I was under the impression that a judge would have had to sign off on a warrant for Vodafone to hand over his phone records. It has surprised me that the details of the judge that signed that off and on what grounds have not been mentioned in the media.
Hi Jackie,
In my experience, warrants aren’t often actually signed off by Judges. There’s a wide range of more lowly “issuing officers” who can sign off on a warrant.
The interpretation section of the Search & Surveillance Act defines an “issuing officer” as a judge or “a person, such as a Justice of the Peace, Community Magistrate, Registrar, or Deputy Registrar, who is for the time being authorised to act as an issuing officer…”
In practice, that means that generally its JPs or Court Registrars who end up affixing their signature without exercising their mind too greatly towards the legality or otherwise of the search powers being sought.
With respect to the Teapot Tapes warrant, the fact that some District Court Judge hasn’t had his or her name dragged into the headlines suggests that the issuing officer was someone fairly low down the scale, whose name won’t mean a thing to the general public (or indeed the legal profession…).
A mere Justice of the Peace might have signed the warrant allowing police acting on a complaint from the Prime Minister to search journalist Bradley Ambrose’s text messages … including his communications with his lawyer? Crikey.
(Next job: certifying a copy of a birth certificate …)
Appalling. – P
Maybe it wasn’t a mere JP …
… although this isn’t conclusive.
(And why black it out, anyway?)
Good to hear that it likely was a Judge who put pen to paper for the search warrant. Too often, warrants are simply rubber stamped by JPs or CMs…
I’m confused. Does this mean you think Nicky Hager’s privacy invasions were ok?
Ah but if nicky had invaded the privacy of someone you didnt approve of … would you still split hairs?
Then he might be a whistleblower … it all depends on your point of view rather than “jots and tittles” of the law. What would pentecostals say about prophets and personally directed prophecy …. is that an invasion of privacy?
I think the argument is at present … that privacy law may eventually only protect the rich, privileged and powerful and their ability to buy privacy. It pretty much is that way already…. its who can outspend who in courts of law .. and for how long.
For the record … I regard Hager as pretty thin in terms of his approach … but i defend his right to stick it up people like the goofy National Pollie (cant remember his name … ran a bank if i remember rightly) given the claims made by said pollie to the electorate ..
Hi Ivan. I neither approve or disapprove of most of them so no need to split any hairs. I’m just trying to figure out which rules should apply to whom?
I strongly approve of whistle-blowers, having been evicted from the USA for blowing the whistle on spiritual abuse in a mission organisation. Like you, I also oppose any abuse of prophecy or position, Pentecostal or otherwise.
Very glad that we are discussing privacy laws, to minimise misuse or abuse by anyone.
Exactly mate … problem is … people like bonhoeffer stood against a regime elected (no matter what the leadup etc) by the electorate … and the duly constituted laws of said regime … and so did many others …
My argument is … in bonhoeffers case … the regime was the perpetrator of many offences against civil liberties and privacy … bonhoeffer offended against the regimes right to its privacy .. which was a perversion of the true …
Thats valid … and it applies to bureaucratic and governmental abuses worldwide.
I agree, Ivan. Glad to hear you appreciate Bonhoeffer as I think/hope I’d have done the same as he did.
Lets get a little radical then … i propose that anyone in civil bureaucracy at high level or Government automatically waives their right to privacy as a condition of democratic process and the perks of the job … they enjoy the confidence through various mechanisms … of the great unwashed.
The great unwashed … who in a democracy are meant to hold the power … should enjoy privacy and the protection thereof to a guaranteed level of human consideration. Dont you think that would ensure we dont have the pond scum we may currently have .. holding high office??
I like that distinction too, except in wartime. Of course, any principles will be abused but that should only make us refine and uphold them.
Hey Graeme,
Ask me that when Nicky Hager is the Prime Minister and minister in charge of the state security agencies, SIS & GCSB …
– P
Pre-bloody-precisely-priscilla (or petescilla) … these purist fundamentalist nonsense arguments “render unto caesar..” rubbish as they are … are a nonsense when its the unwashed at the mercy of these overbred and overfunded and over politically-endowed brutes …
I was wondering, in the light of “Nobody should have the right to read their correspondence without their consent” being applied to journalist Andrea Vance and Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne. What excuses Nicky Hager this condemnation?
G.
I’m not sure I have a complete and well-rounded argument for the distinction I see between:
1) a whistleblower like Nicky Hager publishing The Hollow Men based on National Party electoral strategy documents (including email) fed to him by Party insiders disturbed at breathless deceit being cynically perpetrated on our democracy, some of it funded and enabled by offshore political groups aiming to change our country’s anti-nuclear policy and
2) the Prime Minister’s Office-led leak-buster inquiry lawlessly vacuuming up three months of a journalist’s phone records and the content of her email, tracking her movements through Parliament’s precincts (where she works, holding the government & executive to account) while also, somehow, similarly retrieving a Minister of the Crown’s communications and subjecting him to surveillance.
I think the purpose of the disclosures/intrusions is a key.
Glenn Greenwald said this yesterday in response to President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge Edward Snowden’s patriotism:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/365985629831573504
I put Nicky Hager in the same frame.
-P
Re “I think the purpose of the disclosures/intrusions is a key”, I think you’re right. It’s a fine line but legit. Thanks.
Am i dumb or what …. what have you eventually agreed upon … or is this a case of one party attempting to delicately back out of a meaningless query …
The circumlocutory arguments of great complexity and gilded with the fine ornamentation of hyperintelligence … escape lesser mortals ..
You were barking up the wrong tree graeme … you are a polemicist … as a fundamenalist christian you cant help but be so … so why pretend to see all sides of an argument.
Very sorry to confuse you by being reasonable, Ivan. For a brief mad moment, I thought Peter was right in establishing the distinction in motives for invading privacy. What should I have thought?
Welllll Graeme .. i have to say .. its not about confusion on my part … its about your quite circular and meaningless arguments … when you get trapped by your own argument you avoid admission and seem to merely look for a philosophical “out” while maintaining ‘face’ (you arent chinese are you…) … or thats how it appears to me … you certainly never really ever appear to be reasonable .. more likely someone with a firmly pre-set agenda and a foregone conclusion written (or carved) in stone …
Little point to me .. in arguing with foregone conclusions of any sort .. they always lead to a single point …
Sorry but now you’re confusing me, Ivan. What argument was I trapped in?
I thought I was asking Peter to clarify when he thought private e-mails can be legitimately hacked & published (as in Nicky Hager’s case) and when they can’t (as in Andrea Vance’s)?
His answer (that it all depended on the motive) seemed fair enough.
Have I erred and strayed from your ways, Ivan?
Nope mate … i just think you arent clear in your thinking … and i think you are perhaps a person who wraps himself up in his own web of pristine thinking (or at least your version of what constitutes same) …
You seek to quite cunningly distill all conversations to the point where your reasoning is vindicated … clear to me…