Snowden Treaty Launched: Effort To Get Countries To End Mass Surveillance

from the end-mass-surveillance dept

David Miranda (who you may recall from the time he was detained at Heathrow under the UK's anti-terrorism laws... for being a journalist and having some encrypted Ed Snowden documents on him) has recently been talking up a new project called the Snowden Treaty, which is an attempt to get an international treaty that would get countries to commit to ending mass surveillance.

The International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers, or the Snowden Treaty, is a proposed international treaty for states that reaffirms and protects fundamental human rights – especially the right to privacy, a vital prerequisite for freedom of speech and association – in the context of the disturbing revelations by Edward Snowden. The treaty was developed by experts in international law and legal experts on Internet freedoms and surveillance.

Signatories to the treaty will be obliged to enact concrete changes to outlaw mass surveillance. The Treaty would also develop international protections for whistleblowers.

As well as being required to make changes to legislation and practices to end mass surveillance, signatory states also must consider data protection and the right to privacy in all future programs and policies. This will make the preservation of privacy a fundamental responsibility of governments, ensuring the protection of these fundamental human rights for generations to come.

Apparently the plan is to really hold any countries that sign on to this:

Oversight of state surveillance will also be stepped up. Signatories will be required to establish independent national supervision to ensure public transparency and accountability in their surveillance-related activities. They will also commit to undertaking comprehensive reviews of existing surveillance practices every 5 years, with their results made public.

The treaty greatly strengthens protections for whistleblowers above those already existing in international law. Whistleblowers will not be subject to sanctions for publicly releasing information with the reasonable intent of exposing wrongdoing. The treaty also commits signatories to take meaningful action to address violations of the right to privacy, access to information or to free and secure communications revealed by a whistleblower.

Whistleblowers will also be protected from the actions of non-signatories; by signing the treaty states guarantee the right of residence in their countries and embassies for people claiming to be persecuted as whistleblowers until the appropriate proceedings for permanent asylum have been carried out in full. This will overcome the problems Snowden faced when certain countries claimed they were unable to offer asylum until he applied for it from their soil

Of course, chances of the US signing on to this are basically nil, but it will be interesting to see if other countries think it's worth supporting. Countries that have tried to hold themselves out as bastions of free speech and against mass surveillance might make interesting targets. But, of course, actually getting countries to commit to such things isn't always easy. Still, the effort seems worthwhile, even if it merely raises the issue of what kind of world do we live in that such a thing should even be necessary?

Filed Under: david miranda, ed snowden, mass surveillance, privacy, snowden treaty, surveillance