-
Source: ONE News -
Watch Video
Denying there was a holocaust and posting racist comments online could become illegal if New Zealand signs up to an international treaty.
Adopting the Europe Cybercrime Convention is up for consideration in Police Minister Judith Collins' three-year plan to stamp out organised crime.
The convention criminalises "the dissemination of racist and xenophobic material" on the internet.
"We are looking at whether to sign up or not to that strategy," Collins told TV ONE's Breakfast .
"But it's very important to understand that before we do so we will go through it, and look at all the pros and cons.
"We can sign up to conventions but still have some reservations on them."
Identity theft, money laundering and hacking are other issues targeted in the plan, which aims to remove impediments to fighting organised crime.
Collins said the point is to send the message that New Zealand is "not open for business" to organised crime syndicates.
She said while New Zealand was at the bottom of the world geographically, it is not at the bottom of the world when it came to involvement in money laundering.
"The whole point of the strategy is to say that we are looking at all these areas, that we do have a plan in place," she said.
"We believe it is quite a problem and certainly some of the steps being taken in the last year or so have been about addressing that.
"When we have things like methamphetamine being used in the way that it is in this country, quite clearly we do end up with money laundering."
One of the obstacles in addressing cybercrime to date was a lack of information shaing among Government agencies, Collins said.
"That's really crucial to this because we have lots of Government agencies which have lots of different bits of information.
"When they're all put together, you can sometimes get a pattern which shows we have criminals working to undermine our country"
Collins said she did not think it would be necessary to monitor bank accounts as part of the crackdown, but the plan does propose more reporting of suspicious transactions.
If National is re-elected the plan will implemented over three years.
What do you think - good idea? Have your say on the messageboard below.
Latest NZ News Video
-
Kiwi speaks to TVNZ7 from Everest base camp (1:59)
-
Immigration advisor Bill Milnes discusses claims (4:34)
-
Dance to save Shakti service (0:41)
Add a Comment:
Post new commentWatchmanz said on 2011-08-31 @ 09:25 NZDT: Report abusive post
So now the Government proposes to legislate what we cannot and cannot say in an unregulated environment? The internet is international and is not owned by any nation so how can it be legal to pass legislation dictating our activities in an environment in which they have no jurisdiction? Whatever happened to freedom of speech? Unfortunately, in New Zealand, there are so many laws governing what we cannot do nowadays, that any semblance of true democracy has been lost.
SilencedTruth said on 2011-08-25 @ 19:38 NZDT: Report abusive post
Will this include racism against white people?
JoeMich said on 2011-08-25 @ 15:24 NZDT: Report abusive post
Does anyone proposing this law know anything about the Holocaust story? Not even the believers in the story can agree what the official story should be. These politicians better have their version of the Holocaust story written down and distributed so people will know what they have to believe. Someone that has given the matter some thought, unlike the idiots proposing the law, has posted an excellent article on Holocaust denial here. www.ihr.org/leaflets/denial.shtml
randomnumbers said on 2011-08-25 @ 13:46 NZDT: Report abusive post
The internet is full of people saying horrible things, true, but it's incredibly easy to ignore offensive material/people. It's impossible to ignore regulations placed on what you can and cannot say. And even then, so many things are open to differing interpretations... opening legal channels to persecute people based on reading offense in internet content is hardly a good idea. Not to mention, retaining freed speech in at least one medium would be nice even if it means dodging offensive content
allcock said on 2011-08-25 @ 07:09 NZDT: Report abusive post
I