Search and Surveillance Bill to be Law by April

Judith Collins, Minister of Justice, has announced that she intends that the Search and Surveillance Bill is law by mid-April this year.

Mid-April is when the 'temporary Video Surveillance law' expires. That is the law rushed through parliament to retrospectively legalise illegal police action. An action described by many lawyers as 'abhorrent' and even 'repulsive' and not needed. It is (or was) already law then, that any evidence gathered (whether legally or illegally) can be presented in court under the Evidence Act, at the discretion of the court, depending on the seriousness of the evidence.

New Zealand is one of the only lands where law can be changed retrospectively on the whims of government.

Once the Search and Surveillance Bill becomes law, we will be even more on the road to becoming one of the most heavily surveilled countries in the world.

There will also be fundamental changes to 'law and order' - the right to silence will be gone, as will the right to not incriminate oneself. And the law has a catch-22 phrase to legalise all future surveillance developments before they have developed.

This Act, hand-in-hand with other law changes going on, mean so-called 'rights' such as the right to a jury trial, the right to be present for your own court case, are being written out of law.

The Search and Surveillance Bill needs to be stopped now.

Video Bill Passed

The Video Surveillance Bill is law. It was passed on October 6th, 2011.

The Bill makes it explicitly lawful for government agencies to use covert video surveillance under a warrant for private property. In plain language, it legalises police breaking the law and planting secret surveillance cameras inside peoples' homes.

The bill has retrospective effect, ensuring that all video footage can be used as evidence and that previous convictions that relied on video evidence are not open to appeal.

Another law, the Private Investigators and Security Guards Act, was updated in April. It allows private security to install video cameras to assist their work, however they are still unable to legally record in a private residence but that allows, for now, video surveillance and records made in all other areas.

This is in contrast to Germany which bans companies from spying on employees, and they are even banned from checking out employees on Facebook and other social networking sites.