U.N.: Governments Coerce Companies to Do Their Surveillance Bidding

The United Nations’ (U.N.)
human rights office released a report today
blasting the growing “de facto coercion of private sector
companies” to do governments’ surveillance bidding. 

From the
report: 

There is strong evidence of a growing reliance by governments on
the private sector to conduct and facilitate digital surveillance.
On every continent, governments have used both formal legal
mechanisms and covert methods to gain access to content, as well as
to metadata. This process is increasingly formalized: as
telecommunications service provision shifts from the public sector
to the private sector, there has been a “delegation of law
enforcement and quasi-judicial responsibilities to Internet
intermediaries under the guise of ‘self-regulation’ or
‘cooperation.'” The enactment of statutory requirements for
companies to make their networks “wiretap-ready” is a particular
concern, not least because it creates an environment that
facilitates sweeping surveillance measures.

As tech blog GigaOM
notes, “no names were named” among either governments or
companies. However, it’s not too hard to guess that the U.S. is a
primary focus, since the report is quick to acknowledge that
“concerns have been amplified following revelations in 2013 and
2014 that … the National Security Agency in the United States of
America  [has] developed technologies allowing access to much
global internet traffic, calling records in the United States,
individuals’ electronic address books and huge volumes of other
digital communications content.”

The U.N. paper criticizes that a preferred NSA argument –
because metadata collection it doesn’t divulge communication
content, no one’s right to privacy is violated – “is not
persuasive.” And, “increasing reliance of governments on private
sector actors to retain data ‘just in case’ it is needed for
government purposes” is “neither necessary or proportionate.”

The intergovernmental organizations warns that as “mass
surveillance technologies are now entering the global market… the
risk that digital surveillance will escape governmental controls”
is growing.

Calling upon nations to conform to U.N. guidelines,
the report repeatedly says that the snooping practice violates
international law and treaties. On that matter, all I can say is
big whoop. Surveillance is a serious issue and it does
violate people’s rights, but international agreements
don’t override domestic law or autonomy, and the line of
thought that the best way to deal with a big, abusive government is
to entrust it with enforcing even more laws is head-spinning.

A more productive suggestion to ensure that “technologies are
used to deliver on their potential towards the improved enjoyment
of … human rights” is that “a dialogue involving all interested
stakeholders, including member states, civil society, scientific
and technical communities, the business sector, academics and human
rights experts” should take place.

And that makes sense. More important than law is a social shift
that could come from such a discussion. Individual Americans,
particularly business owners and employees – not just at large
companies like AT&T that are accused of being complicit in mass
surveillance, but at smaller companies that engage in security
camera
partnerships with local law enforcement, or car repo businesses
that gather
millions of lincense plate images and sell them to police
– have to decide whether or not they want to be complicit in
surveillance behavior that threatens everyone’s privacy. It’s an
issue that won’t be solved overnight or by the well-meaning finger
wagging of the U.N., since the technological capabilities we are
grappling with are quite new, and we’re only learning the
consequences of them as the technologies emerge.