United Nations Report (#15)

(hier geht’s zur deutschen Version)

The “Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy”, Joseph A. Cannataci, has published another report on state surveillance (the actual report can be downloaded here).

Mr. Canatacci urged politicians to “Desist from playing the fear card, and improve security through proportionate and effective measures, not with unduly disproportionate privacy-intrusive laws.”


In the following, I summarize the section with conclusions and recommendations. He makes five recommendations, and I would like to focus on the first one, titled “why populism and privacy are inimical to security”.

Here he complains about “gesture politics”. The new laws are built on a psychology of fear, i.e., national security is the catch-all argument for any kind of surveillance measure. He particularly mentions the extremely privacy-intrusive measures introduced by new surveillance laws in France, Germany, the UK and the US, which the rapporteuer finds neither effective nor proportionate. Verbal quote: “This, in a time when the vast majority of all terrorist attacks were carried out by suspects already known to the authorities prior to the attacks.”

He mentions a growing concern that the information, included that collected through mass surveillance, is vulnerable to being hacked by organized crime or hostile governments.

Furthermore, it does not even need a hostile government: “… once the data sets produced by mass surveillance or bulk acquisition exist and a new unscrupulous administration comes into power anywhere in the world, the potential for abuse of such data is such so as to preclude its very collection in the first place”.

The other points in the rapporteur’s recommendation section are:

• HOW states may improve privacy protection through better oversight of intelligence
• WHO should be able to enjoy the right to privacy – namely everybody everywhere, not only the citizens of the state
• HOW the right to privacy could be better protected through domestic and international law

In summary, the rapporteur criticizes mass surveillance heavily (with many points also appearing in the AI report). In particular, he also stresses that mass surveillance as practized today, is neither effective, lawful, nor proportionate.

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Andreas Geppert ( geppert | ett | acm dott org, public key)