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RIGHTS: As ‘Big Brother’ Grows, So Does Public Opposition – Report

Miriam Kagan

WASHINGTON, Sep 5 2003 (IPS) - Global opposition to governments’ growing infringement on individuals’ privacy has risen sharply in the past year, says a report released Friday by a major U.S.-based civil liberties group.

“The public in the United States and around the world is now voicing its opposition to the dramatic expansion of government surveillance that occurred since Sep. 11,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), at the report’s release.

His group, a public interest research centre in Washington, DC that focuses on civil liberties, released a 500-page volume describing the various techniques and technologies that governments – the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in particular – have applied since the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 to keep tabs on their citizenry.

The ‘2003 Privacy and Human Rights Report’ says several governments are using new systems and methods of surveillance technologies, including biometrics, computerised national identification (ID) cards, DNA databases and face recognition.

In the United States, the most infamous of these is CAPPS II, an airline passenger profiling system that uses flyers’ personal information to detect potential security threats.

The system has caused a public outcry at home, as well as tension abroad, according to EPIC Policy Counsel Cédric Laurant, with European Union (EU) legislators unwilling to bend to U.S. demands to provide information about their citizens, data that would be fed into the CAPPS II database.

EU officials, he told journalists, are worried about how the U.S. government will use the information to try to detect security risks, as well as about “function creep” – the use of passenger information for purposes other than airline security.

Private information about EU citizens is protected under the EU Data Protection Directive, said Laurant, adding that it is highly unlikely that the EU will agree to prove CAPPS II information without further U.S. legislative safeguards to protect it.

“While the international trend has been to protect personal information and data … the U.S. has lagged in participating in some essential human rights elements,” said Deborah Hurley, author of a forthcoming report on human rights and the information society.

According to Hurley, a speaker at the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society, human rights in the developing world are being affected by Washington’s policies. “The U.S. is pressuring countries to adopt anti-terror laws and legislation,” she told the news conference.

Hurley worries that while U.S. laws are subject to domestic safeguards and public opinion, those passed and applied in other countries might find a “far more Draconian” interpretation, severely restricting human rights.

Another problem is the growing technological gap between countries.

Hurley notes that technologies, such as GPS (global positioning system) improved satellite imaging resolution, and wireless telecommunications, might allow agencies that possess them to monitor individuals in countries that might not have access to the same technologies, and have no way to block them.

Although many governments were quick to enact far-reaching laws immediately after 9/11, the EPIC Report reveals that over the last year global opposition to such policies has increased dramatically.

“An extraordinary development over the past year,” says Rotenberg, “is the level of public opposition.”

Communities around the world have felt the “ripple effects” of U.S. policy, he adds, and have acted to block or protest legislation aimed at curtailing privacy rights.

The report says activists in Taiwan successfully lobbied against a next-generation national ID card system and a health insurance circuit card, because both would require citizens to submit sensitive information and would violate national data protection laws.

Several European countries have rushed to incorporate the European Data Protection Directive into national law, including Luxembourg, whose laws go even beyond the strict requirements of the directive, the report adds.

“The resignation of John Poindexter (a retired US navy admiral who spearheaded a project to scour private databases for information), the suspension of the Total Information Awareness Programme, and the campaigns against identity cards in Europe and East Asia make clear that citizens are not prepared to make privacy one of the casualties in the war on terrorism,” said Rotenberg.

Rising opposition could also mean that global surveillance technologies are not ”locked in”, despite governments’ rush to act post-Sep. 11.

Because “information policy is a very immature field with many unanswered questions,” says Hurley, there are still “opportunities to imbed human rights into the design phase of the information society.”