2003 Privacy and Human Rights Survey Released

Privacy Digest writes "Out-Law.com, UK - Global privacy report is the most comprehensive ever . The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International on Friday released their sixth annual Privacy and Human Rights survey which claims to be the most comprehensive survey on privacy and data protection ever published. The report reviews the state of privacy in over fifty-five countries around the world. Key topics include Total Information Awareness, the public response to the U.S.A.-Patriot Act, traveller profiling, biometric identification, and other new technologies of surveillance. Privacy and Human Rights 2003: An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Developments is available free online or it can be purchased from the EPIC Bookstore."

Comments

Re:Of Course,

[Scrameustache]

Mention the PATRIOT Act, not a word on the oppresive regimes of the Communist Chinese

RTFA!!!

Re:Stop it

[Trurl's Machine]

Privacy is not a basic human right. Not like freedom to not be murdered, beaten, or starved. There are a lot of human rights violations going on right now, but certain levels of tracking don't even show up on the human-rights-violations radar.

The guys who wrote the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights almost half century ago seemed to have different opinion than yours ;-)

Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

European Convention on Human Rights

[kmarius]

Just to get a more official view:

Quoted from European Convention on Human Rights (available in several languages)

Article 8 - Right to respect for private and family life

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Re:Timing

[kaszeta]

Can someone explain what CAPSII is?

It's the new airline screening system that assigns you a security risk level based upon certain screening data.

More info is here.

Re:Timing

[windex82]

This was the best site i could find:
(little blurb from the article)

Virtual dragnet programs like TIA and CAPS II are based on the premise that the best way to protect America against terrorism is to for the government to collect as much information as it can about everyone - and these days, that is a LOT of information. They could incorporate not only government records of all kinds but individuals' medical and financial records, political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions, buying habits, communications (phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing), school records, personal and family associations, and so on.

In the last decade we have witnessed an enormous explosion in the amount of tracking and information of individuals in the United States, due mainly to two factors... READ MORE

What can I do to help stop this program?

There are at least four things you can do to help stop the blatantly un-American goal of "Total Information Awareness"

* Educate yourself about this program and tell your friends about it.
* Use the ACLU's "Action Alert" page to send a free and easy fax to President Bush asking him to pull the plug on this research.
* Let your member of Congress know how you feel (locate your member here and check out tips on writing your elected representatives.
* Support the ACLU's efforts to fight this program by joining us .

Patriot Act

[Experiment 626]

A lot of people assume because Ashcroft is a conservative and the most vocal opponent of the Patriot Act in the mainstream press, the ACLU, is liberal, that the Patriot Act controversy falls along typical liberal vs. conservative lines. Actually it is much more a question of libertarian vs. authoritarian than liberal vs. conservative.

The real reaction to this act from conservatives is more interesting and diverse. Some share the views of Attorney General Ashcroft. Others oppose it just as strongly as the geek community -- many of the articles about the act on the conservative National Review site describe it with terms like the "so-called", "wrongly-termed" or "misnamed" Patriot Act. A director of the Cato Institute raised many interesting questions about the act, to which the Justice Department wrote up a reply.

Also worth looking at is the Justice Department's own Patriot Act Web site. From here you can view the text of the act itself as well as all the arguments for it and rhetoric used to justify it. A valuable resource for any of us trying to formulate counterarguments about why this act needs to go away.

Re:Stop it

[pmz]

The government does not have the right or the duty to effectively stalk its' citizens because it's "afraid".

The government is afraid of its citizens. The citizens are afraid of their government. All Osama needs to do, now, is just to sit on the sidelines and cheer for both teams. The "war on terrorism" is really a red herring for more fundamental issues, where personal liberties are being stripped away in some futile attempt to protect us from ourselves.

Why is it that in some small towns, people are content to not even have locks on their doors out of no fear of neighbors? It seems they may soon want to install locks, but this time out of fear of government.

Re:In soviet russia...

[wfberg]

Trust me on that one...my phone was tapped 24/7 in Russia, I still get taped when I call back there. It's the "click"...and at times you can hear them breathing...or music in the background. Sometimes they pick up before the phone connects, sometimes after. I suppose they enjoy the chats I have with my gf...

The alternative, simpler, explanation would be that the Russian telephone network simply experiences much more interference, such as cross-talk interference, and other anomalies..

Regardless what purveyors of little boxes with red lights on them will tell you, there is NO way to tell whether a phone line is being wiretapped or not. It's all digital these days, and doesn't require billions of funding (like, say, upgrading the Russian telco infrastructure to get rid of crosstalk interference would), but more in the region of a K or two..

And breathing?? Come on! Conversations are taped, transcribed (possibly mostly by using speech recognition software - it's no coincidence that there was "some" CIA involvement with Lernout&Hauspie, the Belgian language technology dotcom) and then analyzed. Nobody has the time to sit around waiting for some yank to call his girlfriend. If she is being tapped, I'm sure they only actually listen to the tapes of her talking to her friendly neighborhood drugdealer, or Chechzen aunt.

They're still hassling my grandparents there asking where I dissapeared to and why I'm not getting raped in the army.

Had they listened in on your phone conversations, they'd know ;-)

Now, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you (in your case, well, probably they are). But wiretapping is a smooth and silent operation, and, obviously (spooks don't like to get found out) has been for ages.