Last month, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and other privacy activists launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. It would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It’s been dubbed the, quote, “Snowden Treaty.”
Nils Muižnieks talking:
we have a very negative trend now in Europe, where a number of countries are moving from targeted surveillance to untargeted surveillance, and this is quite dangerous. This means that everybody is a suspect. What we need is we need strict rules on authorization of surveillance measures. We need to outlaw certain—the use of certain technologies, which catch a—which cast a very wide net and grab communications of everybody in an area, everybody communicating with a certain person who might be suspected of terrorist activities. But we need to beef up democratic oversight of security services. We need intrusive parliamentary committees. We need judicial authorization. We need—we need to be assured that the security services aren’t doing what they can, but that they are operating within the framework of the rule of law. And we need to provide remedies, effective remedies, to those who have been done wrong, who have been unjustly surveilled and had their privacy invaded.
There are various models in Europe. But very often, to make it democratic, it has to be parliamentarian, as well. You need members of parliament engaged and keeping an eye on the executive, keeping an eye on the security services. Very often you have expert panels assisting parliaments, people who have the technical expertise to know what they’re being shown by the security services. And I think it’s completely legitimate to give money to security services, to give them technological know-how, but we need to do the same to the overseers, so that they can really see and understand what’s going on and keep an eye on it.
Very often these overseers are rubber—they rubber-stamp requests for surveillance. They don’t really go into the meat of it. When I was—I asked in Germany, for example, the people involved with authorizing surveillance requests. They said 98 to 99 percent of all requests are granted. To me, this shows that the system is not effective.
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Nils Muižnieks
Council of Europe commissioner for human rights.
— source democracynow.org