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Communication surveillance undermines privacy, freedom of expression – UN report

RT | June 6, 2013

The widespread use of surveillance technologies to monitor peoples’ communications violates the human rights to privacy and freedom of expression, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion stated in his report.

Rapporteur, Frank La Rue, presented his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

The document underlined that there’s no way to ensure freedom of expression without respect of privacy in communications and called for global attention towards the increased use of surveillance technologies by many governments.

“The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas,” the report stated.

La Rue praised the technological innovations, which promote fast, anonymous, cross-cultural dialogues around the world, but warned that the same technologies can backfire as concerns about national security and criminal activity may lead to previously unseen scale of state surveillance intrusions.

“The Internet has facilitated the development of large amounts of transactional data by and about individuals. This information, known as communications data or metadata, includes personal information on individuals, their location and online activities, and logs and related information about the e-mails and messages they send or receive.”

The rapporteur stressed that this communications data is “storable, accessible and searchable” and when it’s combined and used by the state it can be “both highly revelatory and invasive”.

According to La Rue, governments are in possession of multiple instruments to breach communication privacy as access to the stored content of an individual’s e-mails and messages can be obtained through Internet companies and service providers.

Secret services can easily track the movements of mobile phones, identify all individuals with a mobile phone within a designated area and intercept calls and text messages.

The majority of digital communication information flows through fiber-optic cables, so by placing taps on them and applying word, voice and speech recognition, the governments can achieve almost complete control of communications, the report warns.

The document mentions Egypt and other governments confronted with the Arab Spring as one of the most recent examples of such technologies being used.

The report also noted that the surveillance of human rights defenders or journalists has been “well documented” by the governments of many countries.

“On these occasions, human rights defenders and political activists report having their phone calls and e-mails monitored, and their movements tracked. Journalists are also particularly vulnerable to becoming targets of communications surveillance because of their reliance on online communication. In order to receive and pursue information from confidential sources, including whistleblowers, journalists must be able to rely on the privacy, security and anonymity of their communications.”

La Rue urged governments worldwide to review their national laws regulating surveillance as they are often inadequate or simply don’t exist – to ensuring privacy in communication is protected.

“Communications surveillance should be regarded as a highly intrusive act that potentially interferes with the rights to freedom of expression and privacy and threatens the foundations of a democratic society. Legislation must stipulate that State surveillance of communications must only occur under the most exceptional circumstances and exclusively under the supervision of an independent judicial authority.”

The document stressed that individuals should be allowed all technological means to secure their communications and governments “should not interfere with the use of encryption technologies, nor compel the provision of encryption keys”.

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June 6, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Police protection or citizen censorship? Spain to ban photos and videos of cops

RT | October 19, 2012

Spain’s government is drafting a law that bans the photographing and filming of members of the police. The Interior Ministry assures they are not cracking down on freedom of expression, but protecting the lives of law enforcement officers.

­The draft legislation follows waves of protests throughout the country against uncompromising austerity cuts to public healthcare and education.

The new Citizen Safety Law will prohibit “the capture, reproduction and editing of images, sounds or information of members of the security or armed forces in the line of duty,” said the director general of the police, Ignacio Cosido. He added that this new bill seeks to “find a balance between the protection of citizens’ rights and those of security forces.”

The dissemination of images and videos over social networks like Facebook will also be punishable under the legislation.

Despite the fact that the new law will cover all images that could pose a risk to the physical safety of officers or impede them from executing their duty, the Interior Ministry maintains it will not encroach on freedom of expression.

“We are trying to avoid images of police being uploaded onto social networks with threats to them and their families,” underlined Cosido.

Violation of freedom of expression?

Spain’s United Police Syndicate said it considers the implementation of the new legislation “very complicated” because it does not establish any guidelines over what kinds of images violate the rights of a police officer. The syndicate warned that the ministry will run into “legal problems” if it does not specify the ins and outs of the law.

However, the director of the police argued that the measures were necessary given the “elevated levels of violence against officers” in the economic downturn that is “undermining the basis of a democratic society.”

The anti-austerity protests that have swept Spain over the past year have been punctuated by reports and footage of police brutality. The footage showed that large numbers of Spanish officers did not wear their identification badges during the protests, although the law requires it.

Spain’s beleaguered economy is in danger of following in the footsteps of Greece.

The government has made sweeping cuts to the public sector, provoking the ire of a Spanish public already disillusioned at rising unemployment that tops 50 per cent among adolescents.

The Spanish government has not yet called on the European Central bank for a bailout, but rising economic woes and an unchecked public deficit may force it to do so in the near future.

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October 19, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

First Amendment Violations to Watch for at the RNC and DNC

By Jay Stanley, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project | August 22, 2012

We know that photographers have been having problems all over the country with police harassment, and that demonstrators’ free speech rights have also been under assault. But with the Democratic and Republican political conventions coming up, we have all too much reason to expect that free speech rights will be swallowed up in the vortex of those events, which have become constitutional black holes in recent years.

Chris Hansen, our senior First Amendment attorney, has been litigating First Amendment cases for many years, including landmark cases such as Reno v. ACLU, and a number involving the free speech rights of protesters. I asked him to give me an overview of the situation, and he said that we’ve been seeing three big problems that come up increasingly at all these kinds of events:

1) “Free Speech Zones.” People wishing to express themselves are being sent to distant locations—euphemistically called “Free Speech Zones”—so they are inaccessible to the audience at the event. (There is one legitimate Free Speech Zone we don’t have a problem with, it’s called the United States of America.)

2) Arrests. People are simply being swept up and arrested, essentially for no reason at all, in order to clear the streets. Cities figure that they can just deal with the ensuing litigation later. They don’t much care that they don’t have grounds to arrest people, they just sweep the streets.

3) Surveillance. Unjustified surveillance is common, both prior to and during the event. Recent stories suggest that there is a lot more infiltration of protest organizers taking place than we had realized at first. But then there’s also the surveillance that takes place at the event, where often everything is filmed. Even worse are the new restrictions on what you can carry into the demonstrations, which give the police the authority to search you as you go in.

These rights violations are happening repeatedly, despite lawsuits that are filed and won after the event is over. Chris tells me, “the cities view it as a cost of doing business.”

Consciously and intentionally violating the law and Constitution is apparently viewed as a legitimate tactic by the same police and officials who are supposed to be enforcing the law. Chris Hansen adds,

It’s an accelerating pattern, and a remarkably consistent pattern. In other words, there don’t seem to be significant city-by-city variations in police behavior; there seems to be a playbook for police departments that they’re all using.

Chris says that when attorneys for protesters try to seek legal protection in advance, the cities respond by using various tricks they have learned to get around legal oversight. For example, with respect to the free speech zones, he says:

We’ve tried. Part of the problem is the city often won’t tell you until the last minute where you’ll be allowed to demonstrate. So if you go into court six months before the event, the city says, “we haven’t made any decisions yet,” and the judge says “well, how can I decide this in the abstract?” But if you wait for the police to announce the location right before the event, the judge often says, “I don’t have time to second-guess the city, I’m just going to let it go.”

So the cities have learned that if they keep the location information secret up until the very last minute, for the most part judges aren’t going to second-guess their decision, so they end up sending you six miles away, under a bridge. That’s the classic example, in Boston, where they were literally under the highway.

It’s sad and ironic that the political conventions, which at some level are supposed to represent democracy and freedom, have become empty, stage-managed, institutionalized, Soviet-style show events, while simultaneously becoming the occasion to sell out real individuals’ actual, ground-level free speech rights as a “cost of doing business.”

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August 22, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment