[governance] NSA spying trashes U.S. global role

Wed Jun 12 13:45:27 EDT 2013

Please speak specifically for yourself rather than for the 'south'

--srs (htc one x)


On 12 June 2013 11:04:34 PM parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
>
> If a Canadian, whom the NSA guys loving want to hug as a fellow North 
> American, feels like this, how would we from the South, among top listed 
> PRISM targets feel.... If we have to have an IGC statement it must look 
> less like professional industry association statements and more like a 
> global civil society statement, expressing the horror that people are right 
> now feeling all over the world- much more so in the South... Otherwise 
> maybe IGC can just declare its incapacity to rise to such occasions, as 
> significant as the present one.
>
> parminder
>
>
> On Wednesday 12 June 2013 07:08 PM, Robert Guerra wrote:
> > Wanted to share with those on this list Ron Deibert's op/ed published 
> today. It touches on many of the points recently raised on this list...
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/12/opinion/deibert-nsa-surveillance/
> >
> > NSA spying trashes U.S. global role
> >
> > By Ronald Deibert , Special to CNN
> > updated 8:32 AM EDT, Wed June 12, 2013 CNN.com
> >
> > Can Americans trust NSA's surveillance?
> >
> > Editor's note: Ronald Deibert is a professor of political science at the 
> University of Toronto, where he is director of the Canada Centre for Global 
> Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. 
> He is author of "Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace" 
> (Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2013). (link to the book - 
> http://blackcodebook.com )
> >
> > (CNN) -- In 2011, I was on a panel, organized by the security company 
> RSA, with two retired National Security Agency directors, Michael Hayden 
> and Kenneth Minihan. During the course of our debate, I raised concerns, as 
> the only non-American on the panel, that their plans and preferences for 
> having the NSA secure cyberspace for the rest of us were not exactly 
> reassuring. To this, Minihan replied that I should not describe myself as 
> "Canadian" but rather "North American."
> >
> > As jarring as his response was, the fact of the matter is when it comes 
> to communications, he's right. Practically speaking, there is no border 
> separating Canadian from U.S. telecommunications -- though that's not true 
> the other way around. Primarily, this one-way dependence is a product of 
> history and economics. Canadians' communications are inextricably connected 
> to networks south of the border and subject to the laws and practices of 
> the U.S. over which we, as foreigners, have no say or control.
> >
> > For American citizens, the recent NSA scandal has touched off 
> soul-searching discussions about the legality of mass surveillance 
> programs, whether they violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. 
> Constitution, and whether proper oversight and accountability exist to 
> protect American citizens' rights.
> >
> > Indeed, with respect to the case of PRISM, NSA's secret set of tools used 
> to collect data about overseas Internet communications, some argue the 
> program actually enhances those safeguards for Americans -- because it 
> appears that collection of company data was segregated in such a way to 
> limit the collection to "foreign citizens." As reassuring as this may be 
> for Americans, for the rest of us non-Americans who enjoy our Gmail, Google 
> Docs, and Facebook accounts, it's definitely unsettling: We're all fair game.
> >
> > While cyberspace may be global, its infrastructure most definitely is not.
> >
> > For example, a huge proportion of global Internet traffic flows through 
> networks controlled by the United States, simply because eight of 15 global 
> tier 1 telecommunications companies are American -- companies like AT&T, 
> CenturyLink, XO Communications and, significantly, Verizon.
> >
> > The social media services that many of us take for granted are also 
> mostly provided by giants headquartered in the United States, like Google, 
> Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter. All of these companies are subject to U.S. 
> law, including the provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act, no matter where 
> their services are offered or their servers located. Having the world's 
> Internet traffic routed through the U.S. and having those companies under 
> its jurisdiction give U.S. national security agencies an enormous 
> home-field advantage that few other countries enjoy.
> >
> > But there are unintended consequences of the NSA scandal that will 
> undermine U.S. foreign policy
> > interests -- in particular, the "Internet Freedom" agenda espoused by the 
> U.S. State Department and its allies.
> >
> > The revelations that have emerged will undoubtedly trigger a reaction 
> abroad as policymakers and ordinary users realize the huge disadvantages of 
> their dependence on U.S.-controlled networks in social media, cloud 
> computing, and telecommunications, and of the formidable resources that are 
> deployed by U.S. national security agencies to mine and monitor those networks.
> >
> > For example, in 2012, Norwegian lawmakers debated a ban on the use by 
> public officials of Google's and Microsoft's cloud computing services. 
> Although shelved temporarily, this type of debate will almost certainly be 
> resurrected and spread throughout Europe and other regions as the full 
> scope of U.S.-based "foreign directed" wiretapping and metadata collection 
> sinks in.
> >
> > Already we can see regional traffic to the United States from Asia, 
> Africa and even Latin America gradually declining, a trend that is almost 
> certainly going to accelerate as those regions ramp up regional network 
> exchange points and local services to minimize dependence on networks under 
> U.S. control.
> >
> > Many of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere are failed or fragile 
> states; many of them are authoritarian or autocratic regimes. No doubt the 
> elites in those regimes will use the excuse of security to adopt more 
> stringent state controls over the Internet in their jurisdictions and 
> support local versions of popular social media companies over which they 
> can exact their own nationalized controls -- a trend that began prior to 
> the NSA revelations but which now has additional rhetorical support.
> >
> > In the age of Big Data, the revelations about NSA's 
> intelligence-gathering programs touched many nerves. The issue of 
> surveillance won't go away, and Americans will need to figure out the 
> appropriate safeguards for liberty in their democracy. It's an important 
> debate, but one that doesn't include us "foreigners" that now make up the 
> vast majority of the Internet users. Americans would do well to consider 
> the international implications of their domestic policies before they come 
> home to bite them.
> >
> >
> > Ronald Deibert
> > Director, the Citizen Lab
> > and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies
> > Munk School of Global Affairs
> > University of Toronto
> > (416) 946-8916
> > PGP: http://deibert.citizenlab.org/pubkey.txt
> > http://deibert.citizenlab.org/
> > twitter.com/citizenlab
> > r.deibert at utoronto.ca
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20130612/e7307d9a/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t