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

[Kerry Brown]

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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