Extra snooping widens scope for advice

By JAN CORBETT

When 24-year-old law school graduate Tim McBride published his first handbook on civil rights in 1973, he had no idea of the threats to people's privacy that would emerge over the next decades.

So in the third edition of the New Zealand Civil Rights Handbook, which he launched yesterday, he has devoted a chapter entirely to privacy, describing it as a fundamental human right.

"Although we didn't talk about privacy, New Zealanders I grew up with took for granted that we had a right to a private life," said Mr McBride.

"Now we have less privacy than we used to."

It is the growth of technology, which can track our movements, our transactions and record our conversations, that most concerns this human rights lawyer and senior law lecturer at Auckland University.

When he launched the first, 110-page handbook 28 years ago, friends teased him that "when the tanks come rolling down the street you'll be flourishing your little book saying 'you can't do this'."

"It's no longer the fear of tanks," he said. "It's the database, the insidious surveillance."

He sees society's desire for security as exerting a strong pressure towards more surveillance - police video cameras in crime-ridden areas of town are the prime example.

But, he said, society needed to have more discussion on how far we wanted that surveillance to go.

Mr McBride is also active with the Council of Liberties, which is drafting a Privacy Charter similar to one adopted in Australia. He said this would set a benchmark against which to measure government and business intrusions into privacy.

A draft principle is that people be allowed to live "free from surveillance or the fear of surveillance."

The handbook has dominated his life since he returned three years ago from living in the Pacific, where he advised on environmental law,

His Pacific experience, particularly in Fiji, taught him the importance of democratic principles such as a free and rigorous media and the right to privacy. He is convinced these two principles are not enemies and can develop in parallel.

Mr McBride's handbook has grown to 600 pages and 21 chapters, written as a question-and-answer guide. The chapter on privacy provides a straightforward guide to the principles of the Privacy Act, and sets out how to see the information that is held on you and how to make a complaint if your privacy has been breached.

Other chapters cover children's, employment and cultural rights, freedom of expression, right to life, access to official information, the SIS, prisoners' and victims' rights, and rights with the police.