Excerpt: "The documents leaked by Edward Snowden
made crystal clear how far surveillance had gone off the rails in the United States.
The same is true internationally."
The treaty would address privacy concerns globally. (photo: fStop Images/Epoxydude)
Edward Snowden Inspires Global Treaty for Online
Privacy
By
David Miranda and Joseph Huff-Hannon, Rolling Stone
27 September 15
Activists hope to enshrine
fundamental rights to privacy against illegal mass surveillance for people
around the world
Remember when John Oliver joked with Edward Snowden
about the NSA's ability to collect dick pics?
"The good news is there's no program named the Dick-Pic Program," the
whistleblower reassured Oliver, and perhaps we should take that as some form of
cold comfort.
The bad news is that two years after Snowden's leaks started ricocheting around the world,
and despite some notable gains — a mass surveillance clause in the Patriot Act struck down, an ambitious
new Internet Bill of Rights passed in Brazil — the surveillance state is fighting
hard to hold on to the ability to vacuum up calls, emails and data on on all of
us.
Last month a U.S. federal appeals court reversed a
judge's order to stop the NSA from bulk collecting telephone data on hundreds
of millions of Americans. Meanwhile, in Colombia, a recent investigation
found intelligence agencies illegally collecting vast amounts of data on
innocent citizens without judicial warrants, using American technology. And
across the pond, UK intelligence services are lobbying hard for a new expanded
"snoopers charter" to
enshrine greater surveillance rights and data collection into law.
Dedicated program or not, that's a hell of a lot of
dick pics sucked up by the surveillance state.
It's kind of funny, but not really. Because what we're
watching is an entrenchment by governments across the world who, once they've
developed a taste for the ever-expanding grab bag of affordable snooping
technology, have no intention of kicking their mass surveillance habit.
It doesn't have to be like this. Whistleblowers who
bravely show us how states work in the shadows are a public good, and the
documents leaked by Edward Snowden made crystal clear how far surveillance had
gone off the rails in the United States. The same is true internationally:
Angela Merkel, Dilma Rousseff— nobody is safe and secure in their
communications.
Now we have a chance to change this, on a global
scale.
Looking at the arms trade for lessons in international
regulation isn't an obvious place to start, but it's instructive. A global
treaty to regulate an industry used to working in the shadows started out as a
pie-in-the-sky idea, and the betting odds were slim. With arms pouring into war
zones in Central America and elsewhere, leaving death and destruction in their
wake, former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias wondered how
the global arms trade, fueled by profit-hungry arms manufacturers, could ever
be held to legally enforceable human rights standards?
Late last year and many battles (literal, rhetorical
and political) later, Arias watched his idea became international law, in the
landmark Arms Trade Treaty. Signed
by more than 130 countries and ratified at the UN, the treaty is designed to
make it more difficult for arms dealers to ship weapons to conflict zones rife
with human rights abuses. The agreement is imperfect, with major arms-dealing
nations like China and Russia opting out, but it's a massive step toward
reigning in one of the shadiest businesses on the planet.
This is a case study the surveillance state may want
to pay attention to, because lost causes turn into wins when people and
movements set their hearts and minds on bringing about change. This week a
group of privacy activists and campaigners, including the authors of this
article, are previewing another pie-in-the-sky proposal — a global treaty to
enshrine fundamental rights to privacy against illegal mass surveillance. The
idea took flight in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden, whose work inspired
the proposal, and it feels as urgent as ever given that governments
large and small continue to be addicted to the cheap thrill of illegal mass
surveillance.
Why a a global treaty? Because surveillance is
abstract until it's personal. A drop of inspiration for the treaty came from
the 2013 arrest of one of us, David Miranda, by UK intelligence services at
Heathrow Airport, in an act of retaliation against the Snowden leaks. As the
scope and scale of the snooping kept making headlines, and Snowden's initial
temporary visa ran out the clock in Moscow, the two of us worked together on a
campaign with global civic network Avaaz to push the government of Brazil — one
of the more outspoken governments on the issue — to grant Snowden asylum there.
But it soon became clear that despite president
Rousseff's public bluster against the NSA (her own calls were intercepted by
the agency, it was revealed), it was going to be politically impossible for
Brazil to go out on a limb on its own. With the mass surveillance genie so far
out of the bottle, no single government is equipped to go up against it, much
less set protocols for the protection of whistleblowers who reveal surveillance
or other government crimes. A problem of this global scale requires a global
response — an international legal framework to protect all of our privacy.
Wishful thinking? Maybe. But the idea is incredibly
popular. When polled, majorities worldwide say
they want something done to protect citizens against mass surveillance, and
tech giants like Apple and IBM are already way ahead of the curve,
encrypting user communications to protect against government snooping. The core
principles of a treaty are already the topic of serious conversation at the
United Nations; last month the UN's new special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph
Cannataci, spoke on the need for a Geneva Convention-style law
to safeguard our data and combat the threat of surveillance.
A draft of a treaty is circulating to a handful of
sympathetic governments already, and in the coming weeks and months it will be
circulated among other experts and civil society groups, to build out a
bulletproof document. Last week author Naomi Klein even passed a copy to the
pope's office (the two are now climate change activism allies), and the
office has requested a copy in Spanish for review. The pontiff has a lot on his
plate these days, but this issue strikes close to home; after all, the NSA spied on his communications
during the Vatican conclave that elevated him to the papacy.
Papal blessing or not, the cat is out of the bag on
this proposal — and soon, hopefully, the NSA and its partners in global
surveillance will no longer get a pass on hoovering up our data, dick pics and
otherwise.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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