Does Big Brother Need A Full Time Guardian? The Case For An Inspector-General Of Police Data Management
This dissertation examines the rapid growth in the use of digital data by New Zealand Police. This has occurred with little external oversight to examine the infringement of human rights, including freedom of association, expression, movement and protection from experimentation. These rights can be easily infringed in the absence of human rights impact assessments. These assessments are not currently mandatory. Therefore, Police data management is unwittingly breaching both domestic human rights laws and its international commitments to monitor and supervise police use of these technologies.
The databases created by Police are already very large and are growing exponentially without regulation. So too is the unregulated adoption of new technologies to gather data. The data is analysed by powerful algorithms to reveal private information about individuals and groups. In turn this is used to predict offending and the profile of the offenders. This has developed in New Zealand without any express legislation to authorise these programs. They have been implemented through internal police administration with little public consultation. There are a number of government agencies with supervisory or persuasive influence on Police but they have not constrained the use of these new data technologies.
Building on recent commentaries and reports, this dissertation calls for reform of the supervision of Police. It suggests that scale of police data collection and analysis justifies regulation focused on the Police rather than the technology. It recommends establishing an Inspector-General of Police Data Management to supervise compliance with a binding police code of data management. It will outline how this body will function and how it could be put in law. This would satisfy New Zealand’s commitment to the 2013 United Nations Resolution 68/167 which requires independent and external supervision of surveillance. New Zealand currently has an Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security which serves a similar role for New Zealand intelligence agencies.
