Tag: Business & Human Rights

With the European Parliamentary elections in May rapidly approaching, the European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on a single market for electronic communications is on the fast track. The Regulation, which will be binding on all 28 member states, includes rules on net neutrality, however, they suffer from several dangerous loopholes. Problematically, given the current legislative timeline, fundamental rights concerns may not be given sufficient attention.

The revelations of mass government surveillance and pervasive monitoring of communications that broke earlier this year have led to an erosion of trust among internet users. So much so that organizations responsible for coordination of the internet’s technical infrastructure globally were compelled to release the Montevideo Statement on the “Future of Internet Cooperation.”

Even before Edward Snowden began leaking documents detailing the scale and scope of the NSA and other intelligence agencies’ violations with our privacy, Access had been working with civil society organizations (like Privacy International and EFF), as well as international law experts, and human rights scholars to draft the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance (“the Principles”).

News broke last week that the US government is surveilling the location and movements of international cell phones, collecting 5 billion daily records of cellphone location data. An official confirmed the bulk collection of data through fiber optic cables in the US, saying intelligence agencies do not intentionally target cellphones in the United States.

Net neutrality gets at the heart of many of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 65th anniversary we celebrate today. While freedom of expression and access to information are often mentioned in the same breath as net neutrality, net neutrality also has an important privacy component. Recently proposed legislation in the EU offers the opportunity to enshrine net neutrality into law, potentially adding important protections for user communications.

On the 65th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the celebration of UN Human Rights day, we would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon the importance of privacy and data protection as key pillars of healthy societies.

This morning eight major internet companies — AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! — issued a broad and powerful call for surveillance reform. The joint statement represents the strongest stance yet by U.S. internet companies on government surveillance and has the potential to shift the debate in Washington.

Today, Access is joining a day of action in the United State calling for reform of the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) — the law known for giving the U.S. government the ability to access your email and documents in the cloud without a warrant. ECPA is one of the internet’s most outdated laws: it was passed in 1986, before most people even had access to the internet.

Swedish telco TeliaSonera is taking further steps to remedy its involvement in corrupt business deals in Uzbekistan, most recently by Monday’s ousting of four senior executives.

Today the U.N. General Assembly took a critical first step in addressing mass surveillance as a human rights violations with the passage of a resolution recognizing the right to privacy in the digital age.