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

[parminder]

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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