[governance] Secret Surveillance Puts Internet Governance System at Risk

[Diego Rafael Canabarro]

does not distinguish between DNS and higher layerz, but touches interesting
points regarding confidence.

Secret Surveillance Puts Internet Governance System at Risk
Friday August 02, 2013

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6926/135/

One year ago, many Internet users were engaged in a contentious debate over
the question of who should govern the Internet. The debate pitted the
current model led by a United States based organization known as the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (supported by the U.S.)
against a government-led, United Nations-style model under which countries
such as China and Russia could assert greater control over Internet
governance.

The differences between the two approaches were never as stark as some
portrayed since the current model grants the U.S. considerable contractual
power over ICANN, but the fear of greater foreign government control over
the Internet led to strong political opposition to UN involvement.

While supporters of the current model ultimately prevailed at a UN
conference in Dubai last December where most Western democracies, including
Canada, strongly rejected major Internet governance reforms, the issue was
fundamentally about trust. Given that all governments have become more
vocal about Internet matters, the debate was never over whether government
would be involved, but rather about who the global Internet community
trusted to lead on governance matters.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version)
argues that the Internet governance choice was a relatively easy one at the
time, but in recent weeks the revelations about widespread U.S. secret
surveillance of the Internet may cause many to rethink their views.
Starting with the first disclosures in early June about the collection of
phone metadata, the past two months have been marked by a dizzying array of
reports that reveal a massive U.S. surveillance infrastructure that covers
the globe and seeks access to virtually all Internet-based communications.

The surveillance programs include phone metadata collection that captures
information on billions of calls, access to data from Internet giants such
as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (which may even include user passwords),
and the monitoring of Internet traffic through undersea cables around the
world. Moreover, the surveillance activities involve the active
co-operation of the same governments that support the U.S. on Internet
governance, including the United Kingdom and Canada.

Not only do the surveillance programs themselves raise enormous privacy and
civil liberties concerns, but oversight and review is conducted almost
entirely in secret with little or no ability to guard against misuse. In
fact, U.S. officials have now acknowledged providing inaccurate information
on the programs to elected politicians, raising further questions about who
is watching the watchers.

The surveillance programs have emerged as a contentious political issue in
the U.S. and there are several reasons why the reverberations are likely to
extend to the global Internet governance community.

First, the element of trust has been severely compromised. Supporters of
the current Internet governance model frequently pointed to Internet
surveillance and the lack of accountability within countries like China and
Russia as evidence of the danger of a UN-led model. With the public now
aware of the creation of a massive, secret U.S.-backed Internet
surveillance program, the U.S. has ceded the moral high ground on the issue.

Second, as the scope of the surveillance becomes increasingly clear, many
countries are likely to opt for a balkanized Internet in which they do not
trust other countries with the security or privacy of their networked
communications.  This could lead to new laws requiring companies to store
their information domestically to counter surveillance of the data as it
crosses borders or resides on computer servers located in the U.S. In fact,
some may go further by resisting the interoperability of the Internet that
we now take for granted.

Third, some of those same countries may demand similar levels of access to
personal information from the Internet giants. This could create a "privacy
race to the bottom", where governments around the world create parallel
surveillance programs, ensuring that online privacy and co-operative
Internet governance is a thing of the past.

-- 
Diego R. Canabarro
http://lattes.cnpq.br/4980585945314597

--
diego.canabarro [at] ufrgs.br
diego [at] pubpol.umass.edu
MSN: diegocanabarro [at] gmail.com
Skype: diegocanabarro
Cell # +55-51-9244-3425 (Brasil) / +1-413-362-0133 (USA)
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