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US Working To Kill UN Privacy Resolutions
schwit1 writes with a short excerpt from The Cable "The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable. American representatives have made it clear that they won't tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network."
A leaked memo containing U.S. suggestions for changes to the ICCPR includes gems like (referring to intercepting communications) "Move 'may threaten' from before 'the foundations of a democratic [society]...' to before 'freedom of expression.' We need to clarify that privacy violations could 'interfere with' freedom of expression and avoid the inaccurate suggestion that all privacy violations are violations of freedom of expression." The U.S. changes are pretty much directed at making dragnet surveillance of non-citizens technically legal.
even if the UN passes something to assert "universal human right to online privacy", we know that the ones doing the snooping are still going to keep snooping with no regard for the law.
Land of the free to violate our own constitution. :(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'll spy on your citizens if you spy on mine!
I cannot fathom why the US would bother. It should already be fully aware that it is breaking numerous computer crime laws across the globe. All that is happening now is many other countries are now paying much more attention to computer security and will be seeking to detect and prosecute computer crimes already covered by existing laws within those countries, whether committed by the US government or by any other governments, it is going to become next great spy vs spy game. All the United Nations will do is stand up and vote to say, it's naughty please don't do it, no legal ramifications, no question of sanctions, nothing except the public bruising of US political ego. The act of trying to block it, in fact is a subtle diplomatic trap into which the US has fallen and which makes it look far worse than ignoring other countries laws and acting criminally upon a global basis. It is being made to look like it is blatantly, publicly trying to steal the right of privacy for every person on the planet and all their future descendants. It is going to fail, too many countries will have fun thumbing their nose at the US and making a fools out of US diplomatic fools and seriously guys give about the bullshit double speak, it's closed loop bullshit, nobody but you and your own PR agencies believes that crap. It was a trap and the US diplomatic corps ignorantly skipped right into, smelling their own bullshit as the fragrance of roses.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Lets take away "that" basic human right, it don't matter. In a few years, other rights would be excepted too (i.e. torture, how can be bad something as fun as waterboarding?), and if the progression continues they will be back to import cheap workforce from Africa in no time. We seen this kind of progressions becoming very popular lately.
There is no "us" if the people can't communicate. That's the real reason for surveillance, always has been and always will be: to stamp out any effective resistance before it begins. And that's also why the ability to communicate secretly is absolutely vital to keep tyranny from rising its ugly head.
Well, we all know which side of power vs. freedom America has cast its lot with...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Excepts from it:
The Brazilian and German initiative seeks to apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications. Their proposal, [...], affirms a "right to privacy that is not to be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence." It notes that while public safety may "justify the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information," nations "must ensure full compliance" with international human rights laws. A final version the text is scheduled to be presented to U.N. members on Wednesday evening and the resolution is expected to be adopted next week.
Publicly, U.S. representatives say they're open to an affirmation of privacy rights. "The United States takes very seriously our international legal obligations, including those under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said in an email. "We have been actively and constructively negotiating to ensure that the resolution promotes human rights and is consistent with those obligations."
But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights. The United States and its allies, according to diplomats, outside observers, and documents, contend that the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to foreign espionage.
In recent days, the United States circulated to its allies a confidential paper highlighting American objectives in the negotiations, "Right to Privacy in the Digital Age -- U.S. Redlines." It calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so "that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States' obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially." In other words: America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas.
The United States negotiators have been pressing their case behind the scenes, raising concerns that the assertion of extraterritorial human rights could constrain America's effort to go after international terrorists. But Washington has remained relatively muted about their concerns in the U.N. negotiating sessions. According to one diplomat, "the United States has been very much in the backseat," leaving it to its allies, Australia, Britain, and Canada, to take the lead.
There is no extraterritorial obligation on states "to comply with human rights," explained one diplomat who supports the U.S. position. "The obligation is on states to uphold the human rights of citizens within their territory and areas of their jurisdictions."
Duhhh... what?!? So, breaking human rights doesn't count if done outside the country of the perpetrator? You mean Abu Ghraib was perfectly legal after all?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
UN isn't a governing body. It's a collection of diplomats from around the globe.
What could happen is US getting pushed out of certain diplomatic circles, causing decline in its ability to leverage its influence over issues important to it. The loss is not the type that is easily evident to average citizen - but consequences of that loss usually are, as they can be for example about a US company not getting deals it needs to get or losing bids or even getting its property nationalized abroad, things like that. Diplomatic pressure is one of the main ways of ensuring that your national interests are taken into account abroad. Losing ability to apply it can be crippling in certain scenarios, or force you to take a much less efficient, and less functional means of accomplishing the same task.
Then there's the general aspect of know-who. A lot of things are done on upper level though people who know people. When you're cut out of certain aspects of diplomacy, this particular resource dwindles fast.
Every tyranny is exercised by the few over the many. Your numbers don't mean much.
And this is why Schneier undid 10 years NSA work on subverting encryption algorithms. Terrorists are a miniscule threat compared to our Governments and Secret Services
The US no longer has a legitimate "government (..) for the people." The UK never did, except occasionally by chance.
We know that power like this is abused and attracts those who will abuse it. We must consider whether we want our children to live in a free country.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
We need to support projects like MailPile and BitMessage. Maybe some of you know of or are working on other projects you'd care to mention.
When Kerry signed the Small Arms treaty, it was innocuous in itself. However, it did have a clause which allows UN troops to operate on US soil independent of the Army and police forces.
No it doesn't. UN troops can't deploy *anywhere* without the Security councils approval, and *any* decision of the security council can be vetoed by the united states. It literally has no power to deploy anywhere without the unanimous approval of the United States, China, Russia, France and England. If any one of those countries say "No", it can not happen.
The UN is just a group of representitives from each country. It has no powers beyond what those countries wish it to have. its not a government, and it has very limited powers beyond what its members give it. If it ever deployed forces into the united states to abduct or kill someone, chances are those forces would be arrested, imprisoned and perhaps even executed as a hostile foreign power. And it would not be the UN, either. That power has never existed for the UN and the US is sufficiently stand-offish with the body that it would never agree to it. And without the agreement of the US, it will never happen.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Why do I get to hear that here and not from our local news, or rather, from my politicians who invariably had to notice this?
Somehow I doubt the US are alone in that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you think the signatories to the privacy rules really believe in them, you are smoking some awfully strong weed. No politician--NO POLITICIAN--cares about your privacy. At best those rules will be used unilaterally and when some advantage against the US can be secured through those rules.
On the flip-side, if you think the US is doing the same thing, you're right. This is politics, and you have to see both sides, not just one, through political lenses.
Agreed.
And we need to take CARE of our Whistleblowers.
Develop some thoughts on that.
Obama and his thugs hunt them -- we should provide cover,
shelter and care for them.
How -- that is the big question.
The world knows the past of a China and Russia/Soviet Union. The world knows telco and networking the reach of a China and Russia.
They are limited in their total global reach per country. As Snowden and many others show, only the US and UK can really peer, buy, trade or surround the more interesting global telco interconnects.
Lots of governments have total mastery of their own networks but very few have total mastery of the world wide telco/internet crypto.
It is really only the US and UK who have become addicted to signals on a global scale and now can't escape global comment on their now very public actions.
China likes trade, eduction backed with loans and local political support to gain influence.
Russia likes the individual with the correct ideological, human weakness or cash flow issues that make them willing to sell out to gain insights.
The US is really the one country left with one very expensive trick thats lost all its magic - signals intelligence.
The rest of the world is slowly looking at their own intelligence services/telcos and seeing nothing but collusion and collaboration with the UK and USA.
Junk crypto with codes and methods been passed around/sold by ex staff. Their own staff are not protecting their vital national crypto interests anymore.
UN votes like this just say no to mass outside surveillance - on their citizens, on their companies, on their banks, on their telcos, on their political parties, on their faiths, on their trade deals.
i.e. a China and Russia do not really have to care, all their 'other' options are working just fine.
Most other counties just want their expensive telco equipment to be safer from "ex staff"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's difficult to pin down an exact date.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Let us give thanks that the United States is going to protect us from those dirty third world countries that want to impose basic human rights of privacy on us.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But only the US citizens let their governments spends billions of their own money on it to target them without doing a thing about it. Land of the free... not! Land of the brave, not!
Tomorrow is another day...
even if the UN passes something to assert "universal human right to online privacy", we know that the ones doing the snooping are still going to keep snooping with no regard for the law.
Sure, UN laws aren't trivial to enforce... And yes, it's hard to say to what extend a US court will acknowledge treaties signed by the US.
And hey, the US maybe not even choose to sign such a treaty.
But highlighting the problem, and making in bluntly obvious that the US is spying on people to an extend Stasi could onl y dreams of is a good start. Nothing ever changes over night, NSA wasn't built in a day, and it'll take more than day to shut it down.
But when to US makes moves like this, is bluntly obvious to the rest of the world that going forward internet cables needs to be routed around the US. That's not going to happen over night either, if ever...
i wonder how we manage to have a revolution back in the 1700's since we didn't have telephones or the internet.
There was also no system where horses and wagons had to display numbers, and those numbers could be read by automatic systems on every major trail and on most Sheriff's horses, and which were stored forever by the British administrators for later data-mining. There was no system where long-distance commercial carriages required travellers to show photo-ID, and which were stored in a database, which could also be reported to the British administrators based on a secret warrant. There was also no system which images and stored the address details of every single piece of territorial mail.
The lack of technology in the 1700's cut both ways.
There was, however, the unlimited legal power of British Regulars to stop and search anyone, for any reason. Which was why the US founders included a clearly worded right of privacy/security as part of the US Constitution to prevent that situation from ever recurring. So at least you have that advantage. Right? Right?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
It allows treaty nations to seek redress in international courts. So it allows signatory nations to punish and/or restrict US companies (Google/Microsoft/etc) for cooperating with routine NSA/CIA monitoring in violation with the treaty, and if/when the US takes the matter to the WTO court, it allows signatories to use the treaty to justify their unilateral trade restrictions against US companies.
Since those companies cannot refuse to comply with secret warrants in the US, and they cannot refuse to comply with treaty nations' laws, their only way out of the bind is to stop operating in treaty countries. This increases the political pressure within the US against the monitoring, since those US companies (and hence their rented politicians) care more about being locked out of foreign markets than they care about teh terrists.
Put it another way, if it didn't matter, why is the US pushing so hard to change it?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
As much as I know it pains the US to see privacy advocacy, I'm a bit dumbfounded as to why the UN would want it. Most of its members don't even like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, so why would they give a damn about privacy? The only thing I can think of is to kneecap the competitive advantage that the US economy has in the tech sector, which by its nature is very anti-privacy, though more as a result of the way it functions than any interest in spying on you.
The EU is already red handed guilty of this because they raise a huge stink over it and want to push laws trying to bring more business to their domestic tech services, even though their governments often do worse things (Or would do worse things if they had the capability. Which they mainly don't due to a lack of jurisdiction; part of the reason why they need to have more of these services run domestically.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
us is totalitarian in [very bad] disguise
Au Contraire !!
There are billions of Homo Sapiens Sapiens in this world who still believe in the dog and pony shows sponsored by the United States of America, and all its lapdog allies, such as Britain, Canada, Singapore and Australia.
Since the Edward Snowden affair, has USA apologized to the many millions of people who were spied on by NSA and all its allies ?
Since the Edward Snowden affair, has USA admit their wrongdoings ?
Nope !
Instead, they countered with lies, deceits, and threats, designed specifically to show the world that THEY ARE STILL THE BOSS and the rest of the world must continue kowtow to them.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Have only ever voted D in the past. Now it will be 3rd party or nothing. Every time some horrible government intrusion comes to light Obama is either silent or supports it. Not going to keep voting for my enemies.
Another leaked memo reveals that the next version of the text proposed by the US contains the words "You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him, you must love him."
No left turn unstoned.
More reason to wrest control of the root servers off ICANN (USA)
So, the Brazilians and Germans are saying that you may spy on your own citizens to your heart's content, but you can't spy outside your own territory because that violates human rights. Sorry, but I think that's backwards. I hope the US kills this provision. I want the US government to spy on foreign nations and not spy on Americans.
Both are important. Otherwise other nations can spy on US citizens, and then just report the results to the US government. It already happens.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
These laws apply to everyone. Making 'extraterritorial surveillance' a violation of human rights would mean that no one is allowed to do it. Not the US, not the UK, not China, not fucking Burundi. American technology industries wouldn't be hurt by this, they can only be helped if the law assures their clients that their data is safe.
Anyway, the point is moot. Of the five permanent members of the security council, at least four would veto any such curbs on their surveillance programs.
No. But it's a good reason for other countries, or groups thereof, to establish their own root servers.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.