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Following the Foreign Secretary’s speech to the House of Commons on the GCHQ links to the Prism scandal, we the undersigned condemn the collection and surveillance of British citizens’ online communications and activities through the US Prism programme. We equally condemn the worldwide reach of this monitoring.
National security should not be used by governments to justify mass surveillance, either domestically or abroad. Such programmes directly undermine the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression, chilling free speech and giving rise to self-censorship. This is not about the targeted surveillance of criminals or security risks but surveillance of private citizens on a massive scale – through the US government security services, which British citizens cannot hold democratically to account.
William Hague’s claims on Sunday that innocent citizens have ‘nothing to fear’ are the sort of justification of population-wide monitoring that we might expect from China, not the UK. Mass surveillance chills freedom of expression and undermines our fundamental rights to freedom of expression and privacy.
We call upon William Hague and David Cameron to protect the privacy and free speech rights of British citizens and to help end the mass online surveillance of individuals around the world. We also call on EU Presidents Barroso and van Rompuy to stand against mass surveillance and to uphold the EU’s Cybersecurity Strategy, which states “increased global connectivity should not be accompanied by censorship or mass surveillance”.
Index on Censorship
English PEN
Privacy International
Open Rights Group
Article 19
For more information, please contact Pam Cowburn: [email protected], 07749785932
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Index on Censorship has condemned the mass surveillance and collection of private data through the US’s Prism programme. Mass surveillance is a major chill to free expression and so undermines the right to free speech as well as the right to privacy. Index calls upon the UK, the EU and the US to protect the privacy and free speech rights of their citizens and end the mass online surveillance of individuals around the world.
Index also calls on EU Presidents Barroso and van Rompuy to stand up against mass surveillance on the scale seen in the Prism programme and to stand by the EU’s position against mass surveillance (the EU’s Cybersecurity Strategy states “increased global connectivity should not be accompanied by censorship or mass surveillance”).
Index CEO Kirsty Hughes said:
‘National security should not be used by governments to justify the mass surveillance of their citizens. This is not about the targeted surveillance of criminals but surveillance of private citizens on a massive scale. It is the kind of free speech violation we expect from Iran and China, not a democracy like the US.’
She added:
‘The PRISM scandal shows that tech companies’ transparency reports are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data surveillance by governments.’
Related: UN report slams government surveillance
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Index on Censorship is appalled at the reports of alleged US mass surveillance programmes sweeping up data from internet and communications firms.
CEO Kirsty Hughes said “Mass surveillance is never justified — democracies should be standing up for digital freedom at a time when it is under threat from countries like China and Iran, not undermining it.”
The Guardian and the Washington Post have reported on PRISM — a “top secret program that claims to have direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple.” The program allows officials to snoop into a range of web content — live chats, emails, file transfers and video calls, the papers wrote, drawing from a classified document about PRISM. The Guardian previously reported that the government had seized numbers from Verizon’s network.
Related: ‘Mass surveillance is never justified’
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Caught in the Web: How free are we online?
The internet: free open space, wild wild west, or totalitarian state? However you view the web, in today’s world it is bringing both opportunities and threats for free expression — and ample opportunity for government surveillance.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship is among 107 organisations that are urging governments to respect human rights and civil liberties as they attempt to tackle the coronavirus pandemic through digital surveillance technologies.
“As the coronavirus continues to spread and threaten public health, governments are taking unprecedented actions to bring it under control. But the pandemic must not be used to usher in invasive digital surveillance,” said Jessica Ní Mhainín, Policy Research and Advocacy Officer at Index on Censorship. “Measures must have a legal basis, be targeted exclusively at curtailing the virus, and have safeguards in place to prevent violations of privacy.”
STATEMENT:
The Covid-19 pandemic is a global public health emergency that requires a coordinated and large-scale response by governments worldwide. However, states’ efforts to contain the virus must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance.
We, the undersigned organisations, urge governments to show leadership in tackling the pandemic in a way that ensures that the use of digital technologies to track and monitor individuals and populations is carried out strictly in line with human rights.
Technology can and should play an important role during this effort to save lives, such as to spread public health messages and increase access to health care. However, an increase in state digital surveillance powers, such as obtaining access to mobile phone location data, threatens privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association, in ways that could violate rights and degrade trust in public authorities – undermining the effectiveness of any public health response. Such measures also pose a risk of discrimination and may disproportionately harm already marginalised communities.
These are extraordinary times, but human rights law still applies. Indeed, the human rights framework is designed to ensure that different rights can be carefully balanced to protect individuals and wider societies. States cannot simply disregard rights such as privacy and freedom of expression in the name of tackling a public health crisis. On the contrary, protecting human rights also promotes public health. Now more than ever, governments must rigorously ensure that any restrictions to these rights is in line with long-established human rights safeguards.
This crisis offers an opportunity to demonstrate our shared humanity. We can make extraordinary efforts to fight this pandemic that are consistent with human rights standards and the rule of law. The decisions that governments make now to confront the pandemic will shape what the world looks like in the future.
We call on all governments not to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic with increased digital surveillance unless the following conditions are met:
1. Surveillance measures adopted to address the pandemic must be lawful, necessary and proportionate. They must be provided for by law and must be justified by legitimate public health objectives, as determined by the appropriate public health authorities, and be proportionate to those needs. Governments must be transparent about the measures they are taking so that they can be scrutinized and if appropriate later modified, retracted, or overturned. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for indiscriminate mass surveillance.
2. If governments expand monitoring and surveillance powers then such powers must be time-bound, and only continue for as long as necessary to address the current pandemic. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for indefinite surveillance.
3. States must ensure that increased collection, retention, and aggregation of personal data, including health data, is only used for the purposes of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. Data collected, retained, and aggregated to respond to the pandemic must be limited in scope, time-bound in relation to the pandemic and must not be used for commercial or any other purposes. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse to gut individuals’ right to privacy.
4. Governments must take every effort to protect people’s data, including ensuring sufficient security of any personal data collected and of any devices, applications, networks, or services involved in collection, transmission, processing, and storage. Any claims that data is anonymous must be based on evidence and supported with sufficient information regarding how it has been anonymised. We cannot allow attempts to respond to this pandemic to be used as justification for compromising people’s digital safety.
5. Any use of digital surveillance technologies in responding to Covid-19, including big data and artificial intelligence systems, must address the risk that these tools will facilitate discrimination and other rights abuses against racial minorities, people living in poverty, and other marginalised populations, whose needs and lived realities may be obscured or misrepresented in large datasets. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to further increase the gap in the enjoyment of human rights between different groups in society.
6. If governments enter into data sharing agreements with other public or private sector entities, they must be based on law, and the existence of these agreements and information necessary to assess their impact on privacy and human rights must be publicly disclosed – in writing, with sunset clauses, public oversight and other safeguards by default. Businesses involved in efforts by governments to tackle Covid-19 must undertake due diligence to ensure they respect human rights, and ensure any intervention is firewalled from other business and commercial interests. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for keeping people in the dark about what information their governments are gathering and sharing with third parties.
7. Any response must incorporate accountability protections and safeguards against abuse. Increased surveillance efforts related to Covid-19 should not fall under the domain of security or intelligence agencies and must be subject to effective oversight by appropriate independent bodies. Further, individuals must be given the opportunity to know about and challenge any Covid-19 related measures to collect, aggregate, and retain, and use data. Individuals who have been subjected to surveillance must have access to effective remedies.
8. Covid-19 related responses that include data collection efforts should include means for free, active, and meaningful participation of relevant stakeholders, in particular experts in the public health sector and the most marginalized population groups.
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