13 Principles Week of Action: A Principled Fight Against Surveillance

In the week leading up the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, EFF and the coalition behind the 13 Principles will be conducting a Week of Action explaining some of the key guiding principles for surveillance law reform....
Every day, we'll take on a different part of the principles, exploring what’s at stake and what we need to do to bring intelligence agencies and the police back under the rule of law. As part of this campaign, we'll be featuring several articles of this year Global Information Society Watch, a ground-breaking report on communication surveillance published by APC and Hivos. You can read the complete set of posts at: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/anniversary. Let's send a message to Member States at the United Nations and wherever else folks are tackling surveillance law reform: surveillance law can no longer ignore our human rights. Follow our discussion on twitter with the hashtag: #privacyisaright

A Principled Fight Against Surveillance (*)

Years before Edward Snowden leaked his first document, human rights lawyers and activists have been concerned about a dramatic expansion in law enforcement and foreign intelligence agencies’ efforts to spy on the digital world. It had become evident that legal protections had not kept pace with technological – that the state’s practical ability to spy on the world had developed in a way that permitted it to bypass the functional limits that have historically checked its ability to spy. These concerns culminated in the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, a set of principles intended to guide policymakers, activists and judges to better understand how new surveillance technologies have been eating away at our fundamental freedoms and how we might bring state spying back in line with human rights standards.

Over a year and a half in the making, the final version of the Principles appeared on July 20, 2013, the first weeks of what we might call the Snowden era. An updated version was issued in May 2014. The Snowden revelations, once they started rolling in, affirmed the worst of our concerns. Intelligence services as well as law enforcement had taken it upon themselves to spy on us all, with little consideration for the societal effects. Lawmakers and even the executive had little comprehension of the capabilities of their own spymasters, and how our digital networks were being turned against all individuals everywhere. The need for the Principles was confirmed in spades, but the long and difficult job of applying them to existing practices was just beginning.

Since then, the Principles have, we hope, been a lodestar for those seeking solutions to the stark reality exposed by Snowden: that, slipping through the cracks of technological developments and outdated legal protections, our governments have adopted practices of mass surveillance that render many of our most fundamental rights effectively meaningless. The Principles have been signed by over 470 organizations and individual experts, by over 350,000 individuals throughout the world, and endorsed by the United Kingdom’s Liberal Democratic Conference, as well as European, Canadian, and German parliamentarians.The Principles have played a central guiding role in a number of the rigorous debates on the need to limit states’ increasingly expansive surveillance capacities. Their impact is already evident in, for example, the United States’ President Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies report, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report and the the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ recent report on the right to privacy in the digital age. Their influence has also manifested in some of the administrative, legislative and administrative attempts to address surveillance problems post-Snowden. Perhaps most importantly, they have functioned as a rallying point for campaigning and advocacy initiatives around the world.

Below, we spell out some of the key feature of the Principles. A more detailed explanation of the legal grounding for our conclusions in human rights jurisprudence can be found in a Legal Analysis and Background Materials document generated in support of the Principles.  ... [...] eff.org