Unblinking Eyes: The State of Communications Surveillance in Latin America

 New Reports Show How Vague Laws Can Pave the Way for Human Rights Violations

We're proud to announce today's release of “Unblinking Eyes: The State of Communications Surveillance in Latin America,” a project that document and analyzes surveillance laws and practices in twelves Latin America. For over a year, we have worked with partner organizations across Latin America (Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales, Fundación Karisma, TEDIC, Hiperderecho, Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expresión y Acceso a la Información,  Derechos Digitales, InternetLab, and Fundación Acceso). Each of them published individual reports documenting the state of communications surveillance in each of these countries. Then, EFF took that research and other recent papers, and produced a broader report that compares surveillance laws and practices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Moreover, together with Derechos Digitales, we published a  legal analysis for the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, explaining the legal and conceptual basis of each of the Principles in light of the inter-american human rights standards. Finally, we published Who Can Spy On Us? A Visual Guide of the state of communications surveillance in Latin America.

On this day, let’s take a minute to reflect on the horrific consequences of unchecked surveillance.

 The Terror Archive

In December 1992, following a hastily-drawn sketch of a map given to him by a whistleblower, the Paraguayan lawyer Martin Almada drove to an obscure police station in the suburb of Lambaré, near Asunción. Behind the police offices, in a run-down office building, he discovered a cache of 700,000 documents, piled nearly to the ceiling. This was the “Terror Archive,” an almost complete record of the interrogations, torture, and surveillance conducted by the Paraguayan military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. The files reported details of “Operation Condor,” a clandestine program between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil between the 1970s and 1980s. The military governments of those nations agreed to cooperate in sending teams into other countries to track, monitor, and kill their political opponents. The files listed more than 50,000 deaths and 400,000 political prisoners throughout Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela.

Stroessner's secret police used informants, telephoto cameras, and wiretaps to build a paper database on everyone that was viewed as a threat, plus their friends and associates. The Terror Archive shows how far a country's government might sink when unchecked by judicial authorities, public oversight bodies, and the knowledge of the general public.

That was a quarter century ago.

A modern Operation Condor would have far more powerful tools at hand than just ring-binders, cameras, and wiretapped phones. Today's digital surveillance technology leaves the techniques documented in the Terror Archive in the dust.            

Twentieth century surveillance law considers the simple wiretapping of a single phone line, with no guidance on how to apply these regulations to our growing menagerie of spying capabilities. When new surveillance or cyber-security laws are passed, they are written paper over existing practice, or to widen existing powers—such as data retention laws that force phone and Internet companies to log and retain even more data for state use.  Each of these new powers is a ticking time-bomb, waiting for abuse. One way to stop these powers from being turned against the public is to create robust and detailed modern privacy law to constrain its use, an independent judiciary who will enforce those limits, and a public oversight mechanism that allows the general pu