MEDIA RELEASE BY THE PRIVACY COMMISSIONER
Members of Parliament should hesitate before accepting novel recommendations of the Select Committee which will enable
prison officers to intercept mobile telephone calls.
The recommendation of the Justice and Law Reform Committee appears to anticipate problems about the use of mobile phones
without having publicly explored other means for dealing with the problem. The Committee should inquire into the state
of prison security which allows access to hidden cellphones in prisons and seek technological solutions which do not
involve eavesdropping on calls made or received by people in the vicinity of a prison.
For instance the people of Epsom and Mt Eden may have their mobile calls arbitrarily scanned by a prison officer. Will
motorists on the southern motorway also risk being overheard by prison officers? It appears that this monitoring will
take place only on a haphazard basis without the controls imposed by the bill in respect of landline calls made out of
prisons by inmates. (In the case of those calls a centralised system will cover all prisons and calls will be properly
recorded.)
This proposal is an extraordinary departure in a free society where judicial warrants are mandatory for interception of
private communications by the police. Without such warrants prison officers may, in the search for secret mobile calls
from within prisons, be given access to millions of telephone calls being made by citizens in the normal course of their
business each year. This state intrusion appears to be an enthusiastic extension of the bill by Members of Parliament
without time for public debate shortly before an election. The matter is not one that requires immediate attention. The
Committee recommendations in this respect ought to be dropped until there has been adequate time for investigation and
consideration of them and alternatives canvassed.
These provisions were not put out for public submissions. It is quite wrong to rush them through without adequate
scrutiny.
ENDS