Stephen Judd has spotted the mistake in the Dominion Post's headline: Crims' texts wiped. It is not "crims" texts being "wiped", it is everyone's, including the rather large majority of non-criminals, including those who read the Dominion Post.
And even that's not right: text messages are not being "wiped". Since March 2007, they have no longer been stored as a matter of course by Vodafone, thanks to the deployment of a new system that passes messages across the network without the need for storage or decryption. Telecom is expected to follow suit this year. With text message volumes now up over half a billion monthly, I assume it's much more efficient.
I was one of the people who were fairly relaxed when police gained a greater ability to intercept electronic communications. I could see no difference in principle between intercepting voice calls on phone networks and electronic messages on the same networks, and I accept that sometimes the police need to do that. I don't accept the need for them to force telcos to apply what amounts to a permanent intercept of an entire nation's messages.
If the police want an intercept, they can seek a warrant, and every telco and ISP in the country will readily comply. Short of that, there is no logical argument for storing billions of private messages a year yet regarding voice conversations as somehow too private to keep.
The Dom Post's sister paper, The Nelson Mail, seems to get it.
As you might expect, the Police Association's Greg O'Connor is demanding that the government legislate to force telcos to capture and hold all messages (permanently, I suspect, would be his preference). I don't regard Mr O'Connor as a great servant of liberty, and I wouldn't expect him to grasp the potential for abuse of such an archive. Once it's there, the ability to "fish" for information, or to widen the purposes of searches is only a law change away.
BTW: Kudos to Vodafone's Paul Brislen for having the skills and sense to post information in his official capacity, as he did on Stephen's blog. I wish comms people did that more often, rather than insisting on routing the information through a third party in the news media.
Meanwhile, an onstage interview at South By Southwest with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned into a "trainwreck" after audience members decided they wanted to hear a lot more about privacy and less about the nice stuff. Part of the interview is on YouTube. The interviewer, Business Week's Sarah Lacy is interviewed afterwards here. She seems, like, a bit of a dick.