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[1996] PLPR 54
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Private parts
compiled by Graham Greenleaf
`VETTING' CAREGIVERS IN NSW
As
a result of disclosures to the NSW Police Royal Commission, the NSW Minister
for Community Services, Ron Dyer, instructed the Community Services Commission
to inquire into the recruitment and screening of staff of the Department of
Community Services and the Department of Juvenile Justice, and non-government
services funded or approved by them or the Ageing and Disability Department,
where they are involved in providing care to people in care. This covers
children in temporary care or residential centres or in custody, state wards,
and disabled persons in care. `Positive vetting', or `probity checking' as it
is now called, is likely to become far more extensive in NSW as a result of
this inquiry. The Commission's report is due to go the Minister by the end of
August.
The
members of the NSW Privacy Committee have all been re-appointed, but only to 31
December 1996. It seems therefore that NSW Attorney-General Jeff Shaw still
intends to have his as-yet-unseen Privacy and Data Protection Bill through
Parliament, and the new Privacy Commissioner in place, by the New Year. If he
misses this deadline, the Privacy Committee will survive to celebrate its 21st
birthday, having opened its doors in April 1976.
Dawn
Lawrie, Anti-Discrimination Commission for the NT, advises that the NT
Attorney-General has asked the Secretary of his Department and the
Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to prepare options on privacy for
consideration by Cabinet, but no further details are available at this stage.
In
PLPR's special issue on cryptography (3 PLPR 20), Roger Clarke examined the way
in which polarised views on the use of cryptography threatened electronic
commerce generally. The bodies that run the Internet -- the Internet
Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) --
have subsequently released a joint `Statement on Cryptographic Technology and
the Internet', which says much the same thing as Clarke.
The two bodies `are disturbed to note that various governments have actual or
proposed policies on access to cryptographic technology that either:
(a) impose export controls;
(b) restrict commercial and private users to weak mechanisms;
(c) mandate that private decryption keys should be in the hands of some third
party; and/or
(d) prohibit the use of cryptology' (abridged).
They `would like to encourage policies that allow ready access to uniform
strong cryptographic policies for all Internet users in all countries'.
They are particularly concerned about escrow. They say that `certification
authorities should not be confused with escrow centres ... Key escrow implies
that keys must be disclosed in some fashion, a flat-out contradiction of [the
major principle of system design that users never reveal their private keys to
anyone] ... Keys used for signatures and authentication [and hence for
non-repudiability] must never be escrowed'.
`IAB and IESG Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet', RFC
1984, August 1994 (text dated 24 July 1996), at:
http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1984.txt
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