KEY POINTS:
Corridor meetings and paper passing are on the rise in Wellington as politicians and civil servants grow increasingly wary of the risk of email hacking.
The Business Herald has been told National Party parliamentarians in particular have cut down their email use in favour of face-to-face meetings and
the exchange of paper documents.
Fears over email security have intensified since a raft of former National leader Don Brash's emails were obtained by author Nicky Hager and used as the basis of his book The Hollow Men.
The growing concern over email leaks has presented a business opportunity for at least one software firm.
Hawke's Bay-based Bizibox has lobbied successfully for the required approval to sell its IQ Confidential secure email system to Government agencies.
The State Services Commission oversees government email security policies, taking advice from intelligence agency the Government Communications Security Bureau.
The two agencies have approved IQ Confidential as a secure means of transmitting documents with "in-confidence", "sensitive" or "restricted" security classifications, the lower three of six ratings for classified government information.
Bizibox chief executive Neil Sherratt said as a result of IQ Confidential being sanctioned for use in government he was now in discussions with a number of departments, although none had yet signed up to purchase the system.
More than 50 Government agencies use an email encryption software package called SEEMail (Secure Electronic Environment) which is also endorsed for sending information classified up to the sensitive/restricted level.
Sherratt said IQ Confidential overcame some of the limitations of SEEMail, which has been in use by Government since 2000, including its inability to encrypt email subject-line information.
Sherratt said while copies of "ordinary" emails are typically stored on several insecure servers during the transmission process, Bizibox was able to guarantee emails sent between registered IQ Confidential users could not be intercepted because they did not go through the public internet and were stored in encrypted form only on the company's server.
Sherratt is one of three New Zealand co-founders of UK company Saturn IQ which developed the IQ Confidential software. He returned to New Zealand last year to focus on marketing the technology in Australasia.
While fear of email leaks my be encouraging bureaucrats to use paper, that method also has its risks.
The Cabinet paper outlining plans to unbundle Telecom's local loop, which was leaked to the company by a Government messenger last year, had been classified as sensitive.
An intelligence report unearthed last year among personal papers of former Prime Minister David Lange held by Archives New Zealand held the highest possible classification, top secret, meaning its whereabouts should have been monitored regularly through an ongoing audit process.
While the Government's guidelines for classified information stipulate sensitive and restricted material sent by email must be encrypted, the rules for sending the same information in paper form seem less secure. According to the guidelines, sensitive and restricted information can be sent by "ordinary postal services" although it must be "double enveloped".
State Secrets
The Government's hierarchy for rating classified information:
* Top Secret: unauthorised disclosure could "damage national interests in an extremely grave manner".
* Secret: unauthorised disclosure could "damage national interests in a serious manner".
* Confidential: unauthorised disclosure could "damage national interests in a significant manner".
* Sensitive: unauthorised disclosure could "damage Government interests, endanger citizens".
* Restricted: unauthorised disclosure could "adversely affect national interests".
* In-confidence: unauthorised disclosure could "prejudice law and order, impede Government business, affect citizen privacy".
