[governance] The time for global rules on data usage has come

[parminder]

Newspaper editorials are saying, which sadly, the global civil society 
still remains shy to say .....


*The time for global rules on data usage has come***

The Independent (London).   [Editorial].      11/06/2013.

Blanket monitoring of non-US internet activity will not stop terrorism

For William Hague, the purpose of yesterday’s House of Commons statement 
was to allay fears that Britain’s security services piggyback on the 
privacy invasions of their less legally circumscribed US counterparts.

Taking care to give little away, the Foreign Secretary described such 
suggestions as “baseless” and talked convincingly of a system replete 
with checks and balances.

But even if our own spies are models of integrity, and our own laws 
paradigms of privacy-protection, the less stringent standards in the US 
are hardly less of a cause for concern.

Yes, we live in a dangerous world. Just weeks after the Woolwich murder 
and the Boston bombing, it would be difficult to maintain otherwise. A 
degree of privacy is therefore compromised, in the interests of mutual 
security. But this is no binary choice, it is a balance to be struck; 
and the latest revelations from the US suggest that the scales have 
tipped too far.

It is nonsense that the National Security Agency’s blanket monitoring of 
non-US citizens’ internet activity is necessary to combat terrorism. The 
majority of attacks are homegrown. Moreover, the fact that the same 
indiscriminate approach is not applied to US residents indicates 
Washington is well aware how badly such measures play with voters. But 
while NSA access to telephone records raised questions for the US, the 
Prism internet surveillance system raises questions for everyone else. 
It is also an incidence of gross overreach.

At this stage, there is some dispute about Prism. The companies involved 
– Google, Facebook, Skype et al – deny that the NSA has access to their 
servers. But the broader issue remains pertinent regardless of the 
specifics.

Europe and the US have been at loggerheads over data protection for more 
than a decade. In the past few months alone, EU proposals for new rules 
have provoked a storm of protest from US internet giants and warnings of 
a “trade war” from its diplomats. The latest insights only add fuel to 
the fire, even more so given that talks are set to start on a 
groundbreaking EU/US trade pact next month and American technology 
companies are lobbying for a watering down of the Commission proposals 
as part of the deal.

Much as trade liberalisation is to be welcomed, Brussels must stick to 
its guns on matters of privacy. Data hoards that were troubling enough 
in the context of commercial activity are more unacceptable still when 
potentially accessible by the US government – or, indeed, any 
government. Nor is it enough to claim that the innocent have nothing to 
fear. The internet requires the fundamentals of privacy and ownership to 
be re-written. These new principles must be clarified in law, not 
allowed to drift, guided by considerations of national security alone. 
Such concerns are neither wrong, nor necessarily malevolent; but they 
are limited.

Even if enough of an agreement can be reached to allow an EU/US deal to 
go ahead – by drawing a line around matters of national security, 
perhaps – the problem is unlikely to be solved. With US companies so 
dominant online, however, they cannot be fudged forever. Indeed, even as 
we are spooked by foreign ownership of British infrastructure, foreign 
ownership of vast swathes of personal data – the potential uses of which 
can barely be imagined – is going ahead largely unchecked.

There is, then, a compelling case for global rules on data usage by 
which all internet companies would be bound. Such things take time, 
though. In the meantime, the US must take care not to ruin one of its 
most successful industries. Internet users may flock to Google and the 
rest now, but a non-American, NSA-free rival might find itself with a 
competitive advantage.
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