Exclusive : Inside America’s Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere
▻http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/20/exclusive_inside_americas_plan_to_kill_online_privacy_rights
Tout en proclamant publiquement son soutien, l’administration étasunienne agit en coulisses pour faire capoter une résolution non contraignante qui doit être votée à l’AG de l’ONU, visant à fixer un cadre légal à la #surveillance. Ce sont les alliés de ladite administration (Canada, Australie, Grande-Bretagne) qui sont chargés de mener la charge.
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.
The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services. American representatives have made it clear that they won’t tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network. The stakes are high, particularly in Washington — which is seeking to contain an international backlash against NSA spying — and in Brasilia, where Brazilian President Dilma Roussef is personally involved in monitoring the U.N. negotiations.
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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.
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The privacy resolution, like most General Assembly decisions, is neither legally binding nor enforceable by any international court. But international lawyers say it is important because it creates the basis for an international consensus — referred to as “soft law” — that over time will make it harder and harder for the United States to argue that its mass collection of foreigners’ data is lawful and in conformity with human rights norms.
“They want to be able to say ‘we haven’t broken the law, we’re not breaking the law, and we won’t break the law,’” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel for Human Rights Watch, who has been tracking the negotiations. The United States, she added, wants to be able to maintain that “we have the freedom to scoop up anything we want through the massive surveillance of foreigners because we have no legal obligations.”