International Community Unites to Protest Big Brother

February 11th is The Day We All Fight Back. From Uganda to Poland, from Colombia to the Philippines, the people of the Internet have united to fight back. The Day We Fight Back’s main international action is to sign and promote the 13 Principles. The 13 Principles outline how communications surveillance can be conducted consistent with human rights and serve as a model for surveillance reform. Over the past year, nearly 370 organizations have come together to support it. Today, these Principles are about to receive their most important endorsement: the people’s.

The Principles make clear:

1. States must recognize that mass surveillance threatens the human right to privacy, as welll as freedom of expression and association, and they must place these Principles at the heart of communications surveillance legal frameworks.
2. States must commit to ensuring that advances in technology do not lead to disproportionate increases in the State’s capacity to interfere with the private lives of individuals.
3. Transparency and rigorous adversarial oversight is needed to ensure changes in surveillance activities benefit from public debate and judicial scrutiny; this includes effective protections for whistleblowers.
4. Just as modern surveillance transcends borders, so must privacy protections.

The signatories of the 13 Principles Against Mass Surveillance explain why they’re taking part in the Day We Fight Back:

Annie Game, Executive Director, IFEX, International: "We can't do it alone. Mass surveillance is a global threat to free expression that calls for a global response. This day provides the opportunity for all of us to take action."

John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International, International: "For two centuries citizens, societies, civilizations have struggled to establish binding declarations of rights, bills of rights, and charters of rights. In a single decade governments around the world have now broken these rules – broken the law – through the unbridled use of new technology.  Privacy plays a central role in free expression. In private we prepare ourselves for public comment. Governments have now penetrated the lives of citizens, while obscuring the work of governments. This is a great reversal of the principles of citizens’ rights. It is a great danger to all of us."

Joana Varon, researcher at the Center for Technology and Society and co-editor of Oficina Antivigilância, Brazil: "Mass surveillance represents not only the end of privacy, but also a serious threat to the right to freedom of expression. There is no single democracy in the universe that could resist this scenario. We need to fight back or we will become used to self-censorship and lose all the spontaneity that feeds creativity. Ultimately, it will be the end of freedom in the widest sense."

Gus Hosein, Executive Director, Privacy International, United Kingdom: "For far too long, mass and intrusive government surveillance programs operated in the shadows, outside of the rule of law, and without democratic accountability. But expansive spying isn’t just a domestic problem. Surveillance at this scale threatens the rights of individuals in every corner of the world. The need for reform is urgent, but we can’t enact those reforms if we don’t make our governments understand that mass surveillance, operating beyond public scrutiny, threatens the foundations of democracy. People around the world on February 11 have an amazing opportunity to stand up, fight back, and demand that our privacy is respected and protected. By making our voices heard, we will take the next step toward real reform.”

Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson, La Quadrature du Net, France: "We have a major challenge ahead. On one hand, we have to get these intelligence agencies under democratic control and scrutiny. On the other hand, now that trust in companies such as Google, Facebook, or Apple is forever broken, we need to reinvent our relationship to technology and take back control of the machine, rather than being controlled by it. It can only happen through free/libre software, decentralized architecture, end-to-end encryption, and profound social and cultural changes. Protecting our privacy means protecting our intimacy, the only space in which we are in full trust and can experiment with ourselves, with new ideas and opinions. It is the very definition of our humanities that is at stake.”

Katitza Rodriguez, International Rights Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation, International/Peru: "Surveillance can and does threaten human rights. Even laws intended to protect national security or combat crime will inevitably lead to abuse if left unchecked and kept secret. The Necessary and Proportionate Pri