Information about Criminal Law & the Net

Phil Hamlin is a partner at Meredith Connell.  Philip qualified with a BA, LLB (Hons) and M.Jur. and was admitted in 1982. 

Philip is involved in conducting criminal trials in the High Court and District Courts in all areas of the law.  He regularly appears in the Court of Appeal.

Another interest of Philip is in the growing area of computer crime.  He is involved in various organisations concerned with Internet Safety and has prosecuted a number of such cases.

Helen Gilbert is an associate at Meredith Connell Lawyers.  She qualified with an LLB (Hons) in 1991.

Helen prosecuted on of New Zealand's first Internet fraud and computer hacking cases.  She has presented various papers on Internet theft and fraud, including a paper at a National Identity theft Conference.  She has also been involved in civil and employment litigation cases involving  misuse of computer information by former employees.

There is a cartoon of two dogs sitting  in front of a computer.  One dog says to the other dog that the good thing about the Internet is that "nobody knows you're a dog", and from a prosecution perspective you can add to the end of that, . . . or a paedophile or a criminal.

Certainly as far as identity "concealment" is concerned, paedophiles often enter chat rooms posing as other young teenagers and targeting young boys or girls with the aim of trading pornography with them, or meeting them or obtaining indecent photos of them.

The other common type of criminal are those who hack into sites to take passwords or credit card details, or to cause disruption or damage to a website or computer.

From a detection perspective, one of the difficulties encountered, is identifying the person who actually committed the offence.  Although the computer can be uplifted and examined, further problems are encountered where offenders claim that there were many visitors to their place, all of whom had access to the computer.

This web article will be divided into four parts.

(a) Parts 1 and 2 consider the law in New Zealand in relation to identity theft with particular emphasis on computer and Internet related fraud.  Two recent prosecutions are reviewed, to provide examples.
(b) Part 3 provides a summary of the existing law.
(c) Part 4 reviews the proposed legislation under the Crimes Amendment Bill (No. 6) and examines the introduction of specific offences involving computer misuse.