[governance] Is 'tit for tat' all that can be accomplished?

Tue Jun 11 10:14:43 EDT 2013

See Hillary Clinton's speech of 2010 
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/21/clinton.internet/index.html

To quote

    The Internet and other technologies are critical to foreign policy,
    and those who engage in cyber attacks should face international
    condemnation, she said.

    "In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can
    be an attack on all," she said at The Newseum in Washington.

    Clinton made the comments as search-engine giant Google threatened
    to shut down its operations in China, five years after agreeing to
    allow some censorship in exchange for the right to work in that
    country's massive emerging technology market.

    Google charges that Chinese hackers have targeted Google
    <http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/google_inc> and up to 34 other
    companies.

(quote ends)

Is not unauthorised picking up of more than 6 billion pieces of 
information from Indian computers and networks in a single month an 
attack on "one nation's networks".... Exactly similar to what is 
presented as China having done to Google (here too information was 
picked up in an unathourised manner, and not physical damage to networks 
or anything else was done)

Do we still have doubts about US's hypocrisy??

parminder

On Tuesday 11 June 2013 07:24 PM, parminder wrote:
>
> Also noteworthy - about the point of willing cooperation or not - that 
> Google fails to mention this stuff in its so called transparency 
> report... What is the justification for that...
>
>
> On Tuesday 11 June 2013 07:13 PM, michael gurstein wrote:
>>
>> The difficulty Kerry and all is that even if the US companies were 
>> ``cooperat(ing) within the boundaries of the law``, it was 
>> (necessarily) a US law bounded by, but enforcing US jurisdiction.
>>
>> The Internet dominant companies involved are of course companies with 
>> global reach, global markets, global users and among the most active 
>> purveyors of an open and free/boundaryless Internet and what your 
>> post and the bulk of the discussion on these matters does not address 
>> is that the other (non-US) users of these services have essentially 
>> no protection under these laws. They/we are `fair game`.
>>
>> In some cases/places we have some protection under our own national 
>> laws but given that these laws have no jurisdiction (or truly 
>> effective influence) over the companies themselves (as has been 
>> demonstrated in various matters particularly in the European context 
>> and as is currently being articulated to her credit by our Canadian 
>> Privacy Commissioner) we are truly naked in front of these 
>> surveillance mechanisms (and given the current state of the US 
>> security panic we are all under suspicion until proven innocent); 
>> with by the way no evident means of authenticating one`s innocence in 
>> any lasting way.
>>
>> M
>>
>> *From:*governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org 
>> [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] *On Behalf Of *Kerry Brown
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 11, 2013 8:54 AM
>> *To:* governance at lists.igcaucus.org
>> *Subject:* RE: [governance] Is 'tit for tat' all that can be 
>> accomplished?
>>
>> The language is too confrontational (i.e. “notes with horror”). It 
>> will never be taken seriously.
>>
>> There is no proof that any of the companies you mention cooperated 
>> willingly. I think that they all have cooperated within the 
>> boundaries of the law but that is opinion. I haven’t seen any proof. 
>> I think a far more likely scenario is that the NSA uses a variety of 
>> methods, some possibly illegal, to collect data that probably 
>> includes data from the mentioned companies. That is speculation. If 
>> we are going to express opinions and speculation we need to call out 
>> that we are doing that.
>>
>> Kerry Brown
>>
>> (Proposed text below - very rough first draft to get things rolling)
>>
>> The Internet Governance Caucus notes with horror the manner in which 
>> the global population is being subject to such intrusive and intense 
>> surveillance by the US government in complicity with US based 
>> companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, 
>> Skype, YouTube and Apple. Apart from being against all tenets of 
>> basic human rights, it exposes the hypocrisy of the claims by the US 
>> government of a special global legitimacy based on the 'historic 
>> role' vis a vis the governance of the Internet.  We are further 
>> troubled that in US government statements on the PRISM related 
>> disclosures, the main defence it seems to take is to say that they 
>> would never do any such thing to any US citizen. What about the non 
>> US citizens? And what about the claims of the US government that they 
>> are responsible to the 'global Internet community', a refrain 
>> frequently heard from the US government in the global Internet 
>> governance space? Why the double talk across spaces where technical 
>> management of the Internet is discussed and where 'harder' issues of 
>> privacy, security and rights – from political and civil rights to 
>> economic and social rights - get implicated?
>>
>> We are also extremely disappointed by how the US based global 
>> companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, 
>> YouTube and Apple – betrayed the trust of their global customers in 
>> cooperating with the US government in such mass scale surveillance. 
>> Reports on how Twitter seems to have refused to cooperate show the 
>> kind of options that may have been available to these other companies 
>> as well. The denials by some of these companies about allowing 
>> government deep and largely indiscriminate access to information on 
>> their servers seem to run contrary to most news reports, which have 
>> not been contradicted by US authorities on these aspects.
>>
>> We wonder if there is a pro quid quo between the US government and 
>> these US based Internet companies with global operations, whereby 
>> these companies help further US government's political, military, etc 
>> interests worldwide and the US government in turn puts its political 
>> might in service of ensuring an unregulated global space for these 
>> Internet businesses? A good example of this is the insistence by the 
>> US government at the OECD and US-EU trade talks to maintain lowest 
>> possible data privacy standards, against considerable resistance by 
>> EU countries.
>>
>> The Internet Governance Caucus demand that the Human Rights Council 
>> calls for a special report and a special session on this issue. It 
>> should also proceed to examine ways to develop globally-applicable 
>> norms and principles on digital privacy and basic structures of legal 
>> frameworks and due process that ensures people's rights in online 
>> spaces – both civil and political rights as well as social and 
>> economic rights.
>>
>

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