Security, Internet principles and human rights – PL 05 2014

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13 June 2014 | 14:30-16:00
Programme overview 2014

Session description

In this plenary we consider the overlaps, and disconnects, between three sorts of aspirations for internet design, access, and use. For some these three concerns are non-reconcilable. For others they must be reconciled if the internet is to remain viable and accessible for more than a wealthy and educated minority; and remain a democratic rather than oppressive medium.

For others, declarations of intent and high-level agreements on broad principles do not deal adequately with how to (re)design the internet in a rights-based and principled way. The devil here is in the details and knowledge of these details is not accessible for all. What everyone does agree on is that internet design, access, and use lie at the heart of political, economic, and everyday life whether we like it or not. And recent events underscore the need to ensure that human rights and freedoms can be protected and enjoyed online not only today but also in the future. As a number of high-level meetings produce statements recognizing that human rights online matter (e.g., NETmundial), and that internet governance processes need to work with agreed–upon and transparent principles, experts and lay-persons are mobilizing to see these aspirations put into practice in palpable ways. However, opinions differ markedly on what the priorities are (e.g. state security versus personal privacy), how to achieve these goals, by whom, by what means, and for whose benefit.

The plenary will consider the interrelationship between security priorities, internationally agreed sets of principles for internet governance, and international human rights norms from a range of perspectives. It will unpack different understandings of these three goals and their implications for the future of the internet that can be accessed and enjoyed by all. The plenary will engage the various views of political representatives, the technical community, intergovernmental organizations, internet businesses, and ordinary people on the relationship between these three concerns and whether this implies a zero-sum game, Catch 22, or a Faustian Pact.

Key participants will be invited to speak from the floor and from the podium in response to the following questions, listed below in a preliminary formulation and so open for input before the meeting.

What

1) Security: How do we understand security in an internet age? Do we need to rethink what we mean by security? Are these three goals interdependent, or mutually exclusive in practice? How to balance state security concerns with the legal responsibilities power holders have (governmental and business, public institutions like schools) to protect human rights of citizens, customers, and other constituencies?

How to do so when citizens’ data and digital footprints and online practices straddle more than one national border?
What other sorts of security are at stake online? For children, people with disabilities, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups?

2) Working Principles: What sorts of present, and past decisions on internet design, access, and use (over-)securitize parts of the internet, or unintentionally enable practices that undermine rights and freedoms (e.g., mass surveillance, data retention, flaming) and so lead to a “chilling effect” for people’s ability to speak, move, and think freely online? International/intergovernmental Sets of Internet Principles (e.g. NM, IRPC Charter, CoE Guide, PACE; inter alia): How to balance universality with particular – local – needs and priorities?

All sets of principles mention, or articulate human rights as fundamental, integral, and therefore indispensable to the future of the internet. How to identify principles that are human rights compliant?
If such agreements are embedded in law, or agreed to as non-binding, or self-regulated undertakings, what are the implications for R&D and design decisions in the deeper layers of code and internet’s technical architecture: what should come first, the rights-based principles or the technical solution?

How & Who

Recognition than human rights online must be protected and internet design, access and use must be able to ensure that people can enjoy human rights and freedoms online is one thing, but implementation is another.

How to implement these decisions, terms of use, R&D in technical and legal terms?
Who undertakes to ensure that rights and freedoms are upheld and if they are not where can people go? Is it an either-or between regulation and rule of law, or “self-regulation”?
What sorts of mechanisms are in place, or are needed to ensure accountability and transparency, and intelligibility for non-experts looking for redress? E.g. privacy violations, takedown requests, misuses of personal data, bullying and online hate speech

Futures

Human rights as a principle of internet governance/security measures as a means to protect human rights, these assume that all users are aware of the issues.
In terms of education, awareness raising, and literacy (broadly defined): who needs to be educated about these issues? Children or their parents? Local government officials or politicians? Engineers or Shareholders?

How can we reconsider these three issues, security in particular, for the next generation whose understanding of privacy, propriety, and security are forming online and through social relationships online?

Where do public service commitments and sustenance of public spaces online relate to security (state, personal, commercial) priorities where the internet is central?

Format and Key Participants

This plenary is organized in order to ensure depth and breadth of content and participation. Key participants comprise two groups, on the podium and from the floor. Interventions will be brief and in response to thematic themes for this session. Participants from the floor and on the podium have equal speaking rights. Other members from the audience are also welcome to contribute.

Key participants on the podium:

Jeannette Hoffmann (Germany), WZB, academic
Xianhong Hu, UNESCO
Jan Malinowski, Council of Europe
Annie Machon (UK), Former MI5 agent and Whistleblower, http://anniemachon.ch/ , civil society
Sir Richard Tilt (UK); Internet Watch Foundation, http://iwf.org.uk/ , Civil Society
Leonid Todorov (Russia), Technical-Civil Society

Key participants on the floor:

Moderator

Marianne Franklin (IRP Coalition (IGF)/Goldsmiths University of London)

RP Moderator

Viktor Szabados

Rapporteur

Matthias Traimer (Federal Chancellery of Austria)

Preparatory meetings and thematic inputs

Participants' thematic Inputs
preparatory discussion (via Mail)

Protocol. Discussions

See the discussion tab on the upper left side of this page

Messages

Reporter: Matthias Traimer, Federal Chancellery of Austria

Internet security is often misused by states to justify arbitrary interferences with citizens` fundamental rights. By applying vague definitions to terms like national security and terrorism many governments take disproportionate measures – such as mass surveillance of online activities of their people. Digital disarmament is therefore urgently needed.
Internet security, which doubtlessly is both an obligation and necessity to protect people, networks and data, should be re-conceptualised with regard to the core value of human rights. The challenge is to find the right balance between the protection of human rights based freedoms and security protection needs in a universal context done in a very heterogeneous world of morals, values and ideals.
Especially for communities that are endangered by non-democratic governmental but also societal repression, the Internet must be a tool to help them defend their rights and to have them defended for them. The Internet should not allow Big Brother to watch us, but should allow us to watch Big Brother.

Video Record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP0WTflUgsM

Transcript

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Hello. Testing.

Okay, people. Our plenary 5 is about to begin.

Does anyone one feel brave enough to go and gather some people in from the lobby? Feel free.

Michael Rotert?

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to plenary number 5. The penultimate plenary for the EuroDIG. And it’s entitled very ambitiously, but an apology, “Security, Internet principles and human rights.”

My name is Marianne Franklin. I’m here on behalf of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition. But my day job is as an academic at Goldsmiths at the University of London.

I have an extremely rich panel on the podium and we have three wonderful people in the part of the room that we call the audience, but of course the part of the room who are also co-participants, ready to speak. And, of course, we invite you to take part as well.

Okay. So just let me have a couple of minutes to frame the discussion today. Because a lot of you might be thinking, oh, goodness. Three very big terms. Obviously they’re trying to do too much.

And so my answer to that is it’s my answer to that is yes, we are trying to do too much. And what is amazing about this plenary for me personally, and I hope for others in the room who have been around longer than I have in this kind of arena, is that this a moment where you can put these three things in one title. You can talk about security and human rights in a concrete way. It does not seem like a kind of oxymoron. And you can finally, since NETmundial if not before, consider human rights in a – Internet principles in a human rights frame.

Here we have a very challenging arena today, but we’re going to rise to that challenge.

And I just want to note a couple of points. We have representatives I think from every sector that is involved in this area, whether it be issues about the limits and needs of national security measures online and offline. Technical communities, engineers. We have the private sector represented here. We have former intelligence officers represented here. We have a whistleblower on the panel so she can tell us what it really means to live as a whistleblower. Because Edward Snowden is, alas, not the only one out there taking these risks. And we have people working on behalf of the rights and protection of young people. And we have representatives from UNESCO and the Council of Europe. So I’m very, very honoured and privileged to be able to moderate this panel. I hope we have a lively discussion. I will do my best to make sure we do.

And I leave the rest up to you. But just want to note something in the guardian, a report on Al Gore of all people. Remember him? He is quoted as saying that the Snowden leaks were “An important service and that revelations also put the onus on not only Governments, but Internet companies, too” and I quote Al Gore, “Pay attention to the gross abuses of privacy that are going on in the business here. It’s clear it’s not just Governments who have been misbehaving in this debate that we are having about whose fault it is at the end of the day. I hope we get past that. It’s about the everydayness of these issues. This isn’t just cloak and daggers and the spy who came in from the cold. This is very every day. We have secured ties and are monitored every time we cross a border, every time we take money out of the hole in the wall, and even when we go online to get an education. More and more of this stuff is going online so that this affects us at the everyday level. We have to link the everydayness and the abuses that are going on every day with the big important issues that do concern us, about the limits of national security measures in the name of human rights. But also security measures that many people argue are actually undermining human rights. So we’re working with a paradox anyway.”

So what I’ve done is we talked to our panelists. I’ll introduce them quickly and then I’ll put the first question. Someone earlier pointed out that we are using one term, for instance, security or rights or principles, and we think we are talking about the same thing, when we are not. Here is our exercise to get things going.

Allow me to introduce the panelists on the podium. Beginning on the far left, Leonid Todorov, representing techies, Russian society. If I misrepresent you, please yell.

To his left is Jan Malinowski from the Council of Europe Human Rights and Information Society – okay. And rule of law of course. Rule of law.

And to his left is Annie Machon, former British intelligence officer and whistleblower.

To her left is Gry Hasselbach, Youth.

And to her left is Sir Richard Tilt, Internet Watch Foundation.

And to his left is Jeanette Hofmann. She needs no further introduction, but co- or Joint Chair of the NETmundial.

And we have Michael Rotert, who is the kind and gentlemenly host.

And we have Olivier Crepin-Leblond, who is representing engineers. I wanted to get engineers on the panel. So let’s begin.

The first question is what is your conceptualization of security? How do you, Leonid, understand security? And we asked the panelists to try to do this in one sentence, because we’re respecting the Twitter culture. So...

>> LEONID TODOROV: So security, for me, is safety on an individual, institutional, societal and Government levels. And competence built between these four tiers.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Jan?

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: We have to take security as being two things, an obligation and a necessity. Every state has to protect itself. That is a necessity. And there is also an obligation towards the citizens. The security of this state has implications, also, for the citizen.

But in order to achieve this, the means are not unlimited, they are not unfiltered, and one has to be very careful as to how to deliver that security that is an obligation and a necessity.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. And Annie?

>> ANNIE MACHON: I start playing word association because of my background, so I think of national security, which is a phrase much used and abused in the UK. Which to me means – should mean the compensation protection of a country against threats. But there is much use and abuse because it’s not legally defined for the purposes of UK law, and it means it can be conflated with fuzzier ideas such as the national or Government interest. And because of that, and lack of level definition, we see the slide towards abuse and the slide towards the State.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: What is the fundamental understanding of security that each panelist is bringing at least to the beginning of this discussion? Hopefully we will end up with another one by the end.

>>GRY HASSELBALCH: Coming from my perspective I would like to use the child/parent metaphor, which can be transposed into many areas of life. Also state citizen. And I think there are two ways or two methods of achieving safety for your child.

For example, if you’re a parent, you can create safety through limitations on access to certain things by embracing your child, by overlooking what they do, by controlling them. But you can achieve security and safety by building confidence in your child, trust, knowledge about the world, skills to deal with the world. And, of course, I think security is a combination, a very balanced combination of these two things.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much, Gry.

Sir Richard?

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: Coming from the child protection arena as I do, I think of it as safety on the Internet. I want to be able to use the Internet without doing harm to anyone. And I also want to use the Internet without any harm occurring to me.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. And moving down.

>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: To me, security means freedom. A safe Internet means to respect and enable freedom to exercise the human rights.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Freedom, safety, security. Olivier, I’m sure you have a definition.

>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Security to me is four different terms that are actually sometimes in contradiction to each other. You have the security of people, of the citizens. Security of the state. Security of the network. And security of the data. And, unfortunately, the security of everything is a bit of a trade-off between one and the other.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks, Olivier.

Michael?

>> MICHAEL ROTERT: Well, since working over 40 years with computers, I make it much simpler than Olivier. I have two parts. Security for me is mainly for the online world. Everything else is safety.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Define security for the online world.

>> MICHAEL ROTERT: If you want a definition of security for the online world only, I mean, safety we don’t have to explain that much, I guess.

On a first chart, it is what is provided by the operating system in order to set the limits, where to go and where not to go, for instance. Or whatever – not having the machine abused by others over the Net. This is the type of security I’m thinking of on the online world.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: And Jeanette, anybody else who wants to add to our definition or database, please come forward.

>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: So intuitively I thought of it in a negative way as the absence of something. Security would be the absence of a threat. Or security would be the absence of sort of essential insecurity.

And then I looked it up at Wikipedia. It’s a short one they offered. Do you want me to read it? “Security is the degree of resistance to or protection from harm. It applies to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, nation, or organisation.”

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. You can see already that it seems obvious that we’re talking about the same thing. But I don’t detect we’re talking necessarily about the same thing. I don’t know about the rest of you. So could I have someone end in – yes. There is a standing microphone just there, sir. Could you please say who you are, just for the sake of us and the auto queue.

>>AUDIENCE: My name is Kristo Helasvuo. I just want to highlight that there are actually proposed to study the Copenhagen School of Studies. So they define security differently as a discourse, the way to promote someone or something to be able to secure something.

So in a way, security would be part of discourse to define some areas or territories.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: It’s a narrative way of thinking. Don’t go to sleep right now. This isn’t University. Sometimes the way we talk about something affects the way we talk about things.

>> LEONID TODOROV: Well, you know, we are in a very specific city, which was the capital City of the German Democratic Republic. And that was the most secure state in the socialist camp, simply because every 7th – am I wrong? Every 7th citizen of the German Democratic Republic was an agent of the secret service. That was the most secure state.

So my sense is that you can have either that other ultimate security or no security at all. So just to complement what Jeanette said.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Leonid, for the very historical point.

Okay. Yes, please.

We will just dwell on definitions for a moment, because definitions are deeply political, if you haven’t realized.

>> AUDIENCE: Continuing on the deeply political, I define my security and safety in Constitutional terms. Insofar that if the politicians and the executives who have vowed to defend the Constitution which protects my civil liberties, then I feel safe and secure.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Protection. Safety. Security.

Okay. Just – you know, I’m thinking a bit beyond my own assumptions. I’d like to flow one security definition before I address some direct questions to our panel. Each of them, by the way, handed in what we call a blurb. They kindly handed in a blurb. That’s a statement about where they are beginning from for this panel and three points. So we put that up on the wiki page for this plenary because we believe there is a lot to cover and you get an understanding of where the panelists are coming from in a deeper sense from that page. So we already have been in conversation.

But before I ask my first set of questions to Gry and Sir Richard, because I want to start, if I may, with the everydayness of these issues, the granular part of what is protection and safety from the point of view of children and young people.

Ann Tickner, a scholar back in the ’80s, thought about this whether it’s just about national security, whether it’s all to be protection from external threats. And she said the concept of national security has been tied to military strength, and it’s a role in the physical protection of the nation state from external States. But it’s argued that this is partial at best, for a large portion of the world security has as much to do with the basic satisfaction of basic material needs as with threats. So definitions do include the more positive and empowering aspects.

So Gry and Richard, you have clear ideas about what is not working from the point of view of protecting minors, young people, as their lives are lived out more and more online. So I’d like to ask you, if I may, based on your blurbs.

Gry, you say it’s just not good enough to say everything is fine. You are very concerned about the fact that young people’s lives have become archives, they have become digital archives.

So I’d like to begin with that question and have Sir Richard respond, everyday security as protection for minors.

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Well, since you’re asking me so directly about archives, and in combination with security and protection, I think there are two levels of this. And what we have been concerned with for a very long time now has been how to build confidence in kids around you, using social media and so on and so forth, using their data online. And when we look and ask young people about privacy, they will be very skilled and very concerned with how they navigate with data, with closed circles, with friends and family, how they build groups and post images. But if you ask them about big data, everyday data mining surveillance, they will be understanding less about this.

And this shows that there is a need for two ways. Like the combination of skills and also someone else doing something. What is here – what I’m trying to say here is that there is one side of the problem that is social. One way of dealing with security and protection by building skills in young people, because this is about their social life. And then there is the other side, which is embedded in the technology, embedded in the way they – in everything that they do every day, in their everyday life, where archives are built. And it’s no matter how much knowledge you try to teach them, it’s impossible for them to handle.

So it’s a very good sign to say it’s not one solution fits all. You need a combination of both.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So enable, in terms of understanding securities, not just protection from external threats, but also protection from external threats. And that external threat is what you are saying is the nature of the everyday life.

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: It is right now. To point out that there are always two sides. Normally, there has been a friction between protection and rights when you have the child online debate. Normally I would say okay when it comes to cyberbullying, this is about a social context, this is about how users use the Internet. It’s not embedded in the technology. It doesn’t help that you limit their use of the social media. It won’t change the problem.

But when it comes to privacy there are two sides. One thing they are really good at this thing with the social privacy of creating groups so people can’t – parents can’t follow what they do and can’t overlook them and putting nice pictures. But when it comes to the hidden, everything that is backstage, not on the front stage, there is something lacking there. There is a responsibility that we have, the ones building the service, the infrastructure.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So that allows me to turn to Sir Richard in terms of the darknet. And Michael Rotert made a comment about the darknet. Sir Richard, what is your comment on this theme?

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: Conference participants who don’t know the Internet Watch Foundation is a small UK organisation which seeks to find and remove child sexual abuse material from the Net. We do that both by getting our members, the Internet industry, to take their material off if they can. Or alternatively by blocking it if it’s hosted somewhere else.

I mean, we see – I’m not suggesting that we are solving the problem of child sexual abuse on the Net. We are probably not scratching the surface. The volume of material there is quite huge. We get about 50,000 public reports a year. About 80 percent of those will be – it will involve images of children under 10. 10 percent will involve images of children under two. The images will depict the most appalling rape and sexual devience that you can imagine. We are conscious of the human rights implications of what we do and we are anxious to see if our processes can be improved in any way, including the availability of appeals against the decisions that we’re making.

We work with industry, law enforcement and Government.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: When it comes to speaking about children and the things done to children and of course others, and how they can be displayed online, there seems to be a moment when we say okay, that’s when we intervene, take down and block and filter. This raises the question about the tension between freedom of access, openness, the rights of the young people, sort of speaks of the need to be free to do what they want online without undue monitoring, and yet at the same time they need protection. So we are working on this protection angle of security.

Any comments on these two? And from the audience?

>>XIANHONG HU: I want to add something on the protection of journalists.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes, Xianhong Hu.

>> XIANHONG HU: To my understanding, I think that security is a universal concern and risk for everyone, not only to the children. Of course, they are more vulnerable.

You know there was – with the Internet we’ve merged that social media producers, citizen journalists, and bloggers who are also producing those public interest reports are afraid of being attacked online and offline. That’s why the UNESCO has been traditionally protecting journalists. And recently, we are leading the UN Action Plan on the safety of journalists and the issue of impunity. We extended the concept of the journalists to create the online media creators to help them, to protect them. And we are also going to launch a study on the digital security of online media actors in the forthcoming ideas. That’s what our work is.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So that’s a good point. There are a number of groups, journalists, children, if we want to protect them.

But there is a very subtle distinction between what – protecting people from the consequences of what they do online, when those things that they do are considered okay, and protecting those whose images – who are being forced to do things that are being transmitted online. So we have very important distinctions that we have to make.

But I think we have Viktor Szabados here.

>> VIKTOR SZABADOS: We have from Romania, to Annie, how can you say that national security is a phrase to watch when only in the UK dozens have lost their lives, terrorist attacks, and when daily people are killed all over the planet for not being Muslim.

And there is another question to Mr. Leonid Todorov. East Germany was a communist regime. For you, there is a no difference between a communist regime and Democracy. Don’t you think we should do whatever we can to defend our freedoms and our life?

And on Twitter, we have a comment also on like how we want to define security without mentioning the word “Integrity.”

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Integrity. Okay. Before Leonid can intervene, Annie, we brought ourselves straight into the mouth of the whale, national security, and that was the remote participant. Do the means justify the ends? And this isn’t just a quiet question. So Annie.

>> ANNIE MACHON: You say straight into the deep end. National security, the concept is there and the agencies which are supposed to uphold and protect national security, to protect the integrity of a country. So, for example, Britain was under an competential threat during the Second World War. It was arguably under one during the Cold War as well. And that’s why the intelligence agencies were given limited powers to take limited steps to protect the integrity of that nation. Now we have seen a sort of slide into using national security as an excuse for the spies to gather more powers. As appalling as the attack of 7/7 was as people lost their lives in London in 2005,and as appalling as the other attacks were during the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, those were just crimes. A terrible atrocity, but it’s not a threat to the nation.

Now the nation is taking on more of this work, counterterrorism, which used to be police services, but they are doing it in the dark and grabbing more and more powers and taking away all of our basic freedoms.

It’s been a slide towards what is – and I say this, it’s not mellow dramatic – effectively now it’s a police state, if you look at laws. They are not being applied to most people, but if you’re a young Muslim male, you know what you you risk. So that, I think we have to distinguish between the real threats to national security existentialism. And since 9/11, we have seen all of our countries slide into this confusion.

I want to make one point about Facebook. I hear what you say, but Facebook is the spy’s wet dream. Because we offer up all the information that the intelligence agencies and the Starzi have to painfully piece together over a period of months and we give it up for free.

And a whole generation grew up with the concept that they don’t need privacy. They have to be on Facebook because it’s cool and that’s how they do their class, as happens in the Netherlands. I don’t want to be frivolous, but it’s a sort of grooming of a younger generation to give up the very nation of their privacies. And we need to tell them and get the information out there. No, privacy is important. It’s a fundamental right for very fundamental reasons, which I’m sure we will get on to later.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you for linking the big with the small.

(Applause)

>> LEONID TODOROV: Just a quick reaction to my online opponents comments.

Well, the issue of security is a very serious one. But it doesn’t mean that it should be taken that seriously. See? Okay. So it shouldn’t be taken that seriously.

The reason why I mentioned the German Democratic Republic and securities is that it is under any authoritarian regime or even tyranny that residents feel most secure.

I was the first Russian who entered Baghdad, Iraq, after the U.S. takeover of Iraq. And I was telling my friends and colleagues from the U.S. that if you don’t care so much of whatever daily needs of residents there in Baghdad, if you don’t take good care of whatever security is there, their personal or individual security, you will be blamed within a few months, you will be blamed and everybody will have that nostalgia about back in Sadam’s time, Baghdad and Iraq was safe. Because there were gas attacks against Kurds and no resistance. So that’s simple. That’s one point.

Another point is that yes, there is no excuse from my perspective for, let’s say, using national security, brandishing national security, for the sake of total control of the population.

We should strike the right balance between privacy and personal freedoms and rights, and the right of the Government to know.

For nearly all of you in this audience, you’ll never live in the Soviet Union. I did. I still live in Russia, for that matter. And so you don’t know how much privacy and individual freedoms and rights can be violated, tramped easily, for the sake of national security. Behind the iron curtain, you know. So I know what I’m talking about. Thank you.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Jan has a comment and then Sir Richard and someone from the floor. And then a request from Twitter, if we could mention “Snowden.”

(Laughter)

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: Linking to what Leonid said and other comments, the notion of state security – and you did put in the notes for this session “States” between brackets, so that’s what I’m stating, state security.

It may be that we are dealing with an outdated concept that is a remnant of the past. Where certain state agencies were given considerable powers that would be totally unacceptable in a Democratic society. And we have to take that and reconstruct that the legitimate objective of security, which I said, there is an obligation and there is a necessity, if you want. But it has to be reconstructed, re-concept utilized, from a human rights perspective.

And if I may quote what the Court of Human Rights has said, approximately, I’m not reading out of the text, it’s my own note of memory: Mass surveillance in the interest of state security or national security can destroy Democracy under the cloak of protecting it.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Exactly. Again my point about Snowden is this is the favor that Snowden has done us all. So, please, Snowden once again is an important figure in this discussion.

But I think we need to hear from the floor. He has been standing there very, very patiently. Just say your name for the record, please.

>>AUDIENCE: Stefan Herwig. I’m Civil Society, but I used to study communication science and I did research on exactly this topic.

I’d like to debunk one or two myths. We have been talking a lot about national security, but I want to debunk the myth that has come up here, that freedom and security are antagonistic, because they are not. They complement each other.

And this is the first EuroDIG that I’ve been here. I heard that we were talking a lot about a free Internet. Obviously nobody is against a free Internet. But let me tell you a few things about freedom, especially if we talk about individual freedoms. Freedom also means control. Because if I’m free, I have my freedom, I do whatever I please. At some time I will get into a conflict with somebody else’s freedom, right? So we need to have measurements in place to mediate between those. And then we need to have measurements in place to enforce. We need enforcement in order to, how can I say it, enact freedom.

Now we are talking about the Internet, every time someone says “free Internet,” at the moment we don’t have any rules of enforcement. So it feels more like anarchy, because that is freedom without rules, freedom without enforcement is anarchy.

Can I just close the point?

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay.

>> AUDIENCE: Right? At the moment, so that means anarchy means we will be sitting at the survival of the strongest. At the moment, the power is with the people, with the parties that can aggregate the most information. Because they’re not being bound by any other Regulation.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Sir. Thank you for making that point. You are talking about freedom is not the unfettered ability to get information and generate digital archives without due process and restrictions and transparency

>> AUDIENCE: If you strike the right balance, these things will very, very well complement each other. But we haven’t done a lot of basic work on these issues.

For instance, and I’ll shut up in 30 seconds –

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes.

>> AUDIENCE: One of the main premises, for instance, for trying to set those rules is to set apart a concept that the Romans founded already, to set apart the public domain and the private domain. So far Internet Regulation hasn’t done anything there. Things are completely off balance.

The other thing –

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: No. That’s it.

>> AUDIENCE: A level between anonymity, pseudonymity and identity. If we do that, then on top of that we can start with enforcement.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. I know I had to interrupt you, but we are moving into the how. We have had lots of shoulds and musts, and trying to think about the how.

I want to ask Sir Richard, I know from your original statement you are very clear that the Internet can never be completely free, because you are understanding freedom in a very particular way. Could you elaborate from the point of view of abuses of children online?

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: Yes. I wanted to – I will do that. But I wanted to comment very much on what Annie said, because I agreed very much with her about what she said and I understand the difference between an competential threat or a criminal threat, and I have no doubt that the part of the expansion of the intelligence operators is to do with the availability of that material more easily. Like you, I was dealing with the IRA in the ’70s and ’80s, and you couldn’t do that – sorry is this better? So I do agree very much.

But there must be an issue about what you do, about serious criminality. I mean, our position of course is that the material we’re dealing with is serious crime. And, therefore, our response, we believe, is a perfectly proportionate response to the images that we’re dealing with.

But you can extend that argument to other forms of serious crime, because it is becoming much more possible to combat crime through use of the Internet. And that is an issue for, you know, it goes back to the last speaker, really. It’s an issue about freedom.

We would defend what we do very much, because we think it is entirely proportionate. But I’m not – it’s not for me to draw the line about where is it proportionate and where is it not proportionate.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Any comments on that particular point?

Because we don’t want to sort of end up “freedom” is another word for “nothing left to lose” kind of conversation. Because the trouble is, we’re dealing with a lot of truisms if we are not careful, or black box terms.

So I believe in the unpacking, what does it take? Olivier has a point about confusion of terms just quickly, and then we will go to the next audience member. Because are we not confusing the issues here?

>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Well, I think there is certainly a will from certain lobbyists to confuse the term network “security” with “network robustness,” with having an Internet that is “reliable” and at the same time having services that are “trustable.” There is a sort of mishmash between the different things. You mix security with robustness with security of your data – the various points that I made earlier about the different types of security, not always agreeing with each other and having to give up the rights of one type of security if you really want to have a stronger security in another type of security.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: You’re saying these are not mutually exclusive?

>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Not totally. But you can’t have them all in the same bag. There is going to be a trade-off.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Can you talk about Sir Richard’s point? There is a time to restrict and enforce law online.

>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Yes, I think it’s been in general accepted in a certain way, provided there are checks and balances that are in place in order to make sure that the right to stop information or to block things or to trace someone are not abused. And I think this is really the whole thing, being able to have those checks and balances in place and certainly following the law. What we have seen, unfortunately, recently is that the checks and balances and following the law has not actually taken place. And this is really a threat which is actually a threat to the personal security of people.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Jan, I think you had a point there?

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: Yes. That is the point. I would reformulate it slightly in response to Sir Richard as well. I would say that the bigger the threat, the bigger the power that is given to law enforcement or to whatever state agencies, the higher the accountability that we have to place, the higher the safeguards and the checks and balances. And the scrutiny, even if it is expost facto, it has to be very, very – the standard has to be very high. We have seen things go wrong with respect to the fight against terrorism, with things sliding off into torturous, systematic abuse of human rights and so on and so forth.

So the higher the power that is given, the higher the accountability, responsibility, transparency, even expost facto. And the high interest that whistleblowers have, we need whistleblowers, because with obscurity we need to bring light.

And that’s why a few weeks ago the Council of Europe adopted protection on the whistleblowers.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: We have Jeanette Hofmann from the floor. Apparently there is feedback...

>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: I wanted to directly comment on what you just said. The higher the threat. It sounds so intuitively plausible. But how do you actually make sure that the threat is really a threat? And who actually has the access to the data and the authority to define a threat? And can you also include defining and measuring a threat into this accountability scheme?

>>JAN MALINOWSKI: If I may come back.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes, very briefly.

>>JAN MALINOWSKI: That is why I didn’t leave it at the higher or the bigger the threat. I linked it to the bigger the powers. So whatever the purported threat is, if you give an agency more power, then the scrutiny has to be higher. The checks and balances have to be higher. Yes. Exactly. Who will guard the guardians? We need that. And hence the need for – whenever something goes wrong, there is someone who knows and we have to encourage the whistleblowers to come out and say it.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So people standing at microphones, just bear with us a bit. I want to keep this point rolling while we are on to it. Annie?

>> ANNIE MACHON: I think it’s a valid point that the more secret powers that the agencies have, then the more accountability there should be. Having said that, up until 1989, for 18 years the intelligence agencies did not officially exist and our Parliament could not ask questions about them. Since then, there has been a degree of oversight by the Intelligence Service Act of 1994. And there is a parliamentary Committee called the Intelligence and Security Committee. However, I know that senior spies regularly lie to this Committee. I have seen that the foreign secretary and the home secretary, who are supposed to be the political masters of our spy agencies, routinely cover up their crimes. And I’ve seen the way that when they are challenged, when the commissioners and inspectors go in every year, the spies game the process. So they never get the full story. It’s not transparency, it’s a “get out of jail card” for the spies who have been running amok since 1911, with torture and drain strikes.

(Applause)

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I plead for you to be brief, from the audience.

>>AUDIENCE: Hina. It’s a war that we should consider that for trust security watching, we should not consider the spectrum of meaning or field of meaning. And values out of context are meaningless. So our concept mapping with UNESCO 20 years ago said we can map it so we can negotiate it.

So this is thrust making, multitrack diplomating negotiating, that is what is going on. And we had a whistleblower conference eight years ago here in Berlin. And my hat is up for these people who spoke up. We just facilitate.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you for that support.

Continuing to the other side of the room. Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE: Jacob Dexe. My point has been runaway from. But I wanted to go back to the personal information, what we give away and what is supposed to be protected.

And I would like to come back to defining different terminology and especially personal integrity and privacy. I don’t think that we should assume that privacy and personal integrity means not having anything seen by anyone. Rather, personal integrity is a mechanism by which you create your own personal identity, by where you decide to give away your own information to other people willingly. So that should be taken into account when you discuss what kind of information should be protected and what kind of communication should be protected in relation to secure. Not everything is supposed to be secret, either.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Good point. So when you go into a public park at the same time that doesn’t mean that you want someone sitting on your shoulder recording your conversation without your consent and neither should everything be this secret.

Could we have the next speaker, please?

>> AUDIENCE: Also in the interest of clarifying the definitions at stake, I would just like to make the point that we should disassociate the idea that mass surveillance actually had anything to do with national security of the U.S. Government. In the beginning, General Alexander said that the NSAPRISM programme stopped around 54 terrorist plots. Then after a number of studies, he said maybe it stopped 20.Only a handful. Then after President Obama called for an independent panel to review the actual results of the PRISM programme, the NSA was reluctantly forced to admit that actually it only stopped one or two terrorist plots.

So can we not say that the NSA spying programme actually did do anything to serve the national security of the U.S. Government. Thank you.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Any comments on that? Can we – we have come to a natural pause. John. There you are. You want to comment on that theme or open up a new one?

>>AUDIENCE:I want to rebut the last comment.

I’m John Laprise, a professor at Northwestern University. The last statement is correct as far as it goes, when you understand – but it reflects an incomplete understanding of what the NSA was trying to do with its surveillance in terms of mass surveillance. The NSA is all about raising costs to terrorists. So if the terrorists know that they are being mass surveilled, the process of initiating an attack gets harder. When bin Laden was assassinated, you saw that you had multiple physical couriers. These are the costs that the NSA seeks to impose upon terrorists. That doesn’t stop terrorism, but it makes it harder to execute large attacks. And there will be smaller attacks. There will always be terrorists who are dedicated and they will push through regardless of the barrier. But the NSA reactions, broadly speaking, to address this were to increase the cost to be a terrorist.

>>AUDIENCE: Two points about the NSA’s role allegedly raising the costs of terror attacks. What about 9/11 or the Boston bombing, did we stop them?

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Do you mean how much it costs to make a bomb?

>> JOHN: No, all the effort it takes to plan and execute an attack. And this is a statistical approach. You’re always going to get outliers, things that fall through the cracks. You can’t stop everything.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Leonid, you had a comment?

>> LEONID TODOROV: Yes, very quick with my Soviet background. You have mass surveillance or no surveillance. If you have mass surveillance, it will be to the detriment of human rights. That’s for sure.

But let me elevate the main subject of our discussion to a different level, to the global one. We have a NETmundial and we have the roadmap and the principle very well articulated as some of those participants in that NETmundial thought and still think.

But let me just mention that here we are in this European environment, discussing all these issues in what may be perceived as a kind of isolated environment. Simply because we don’t understand that those roadmaps and principles were adopted, were passed by rough consensus which for me is kind of ironic. Simply because exactly half of the global populations, when I say Governments were represented, half of the global population did not sign up for those principles, that roadmap. That rough consensus meant that there were like two islands.

So my question is: With this global world and with this transborder Internet, how can we preach these values being competent that they are universal when half of the global population – well, that is an assumption.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So you are implying that there needs to be –

>> LEONID TODOROV: Do not share them.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So there needs to be a unanimous vote, is that what you are implying?

>> LEONID TODOROV: We should keep trying, but we have to understand that there should be another perspective. And we have to understand why those people believe that these values, let’s say freedoms and principles, you know, should be in a certain balance with the security. Because they obviously think otherwise.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Yep. So you’re questioning about the assumption that there needs to be a balance.

We better go to the floor. Just say who you are.

>> AUDIENCE: Siranush Vardanyan (?), and I have a quick addition to the point that John was making. (Off microphone.)A valid goal. But is that – does that real justify surveilling billions of people, just to try and prevent what basically amounts to a really rare occurrence? It’s an enormous cost to –

>>ANNIE MACHON: Could I just add one comment to that?

We have to think about the definition of “terrorist” if we are going to use this word and justification for the erosion of all of our freedoms. At the moment, in the U.K. and U.S., if you are an activist out on the streets waving a placard in support of an issue, for instance, in London in 2011 the banks were warned that “occupy” was deemed to be a domestic extremist/terrorist organisation. So you might be out there demonstrating and then you are held as a terrorist potentially. And you know what happens, they get black bagged, sent off, or stroked. So it’s terminology and we have to think about that in this discussion.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: What is a terrorist?

>> The state has the obligation to protect the population from terrorism. So it has an obligation to take certain measures. But they have to be proportionate and they have to be effective. If the measures are entirely ineffective, I think that the proportionality test fails.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. I’m just figuring out what do we do next. Remote participants and then from the floor over here. And then Sir Richard, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you.

Sir Viktor from the remote participation.

>> VIKTOR SZABADOS: It was working before. Now it’s working. There was a comment that the Russian spies had Snowden already in their sight six years before he exposed the U.S. secrets to the Sunday people. And he is asking how does the UNESCO and journalists from Russia and other places know.

And then from Romania, he was explaining in a paragraph and questioning how you can think that Iraq was a safe place and that if in your case, in the U.S., if people are killed by other people and the Government has to protect us, he thinks. And he’s arguing that hundreds of terrorist attacks were avoided because of the secret service activities.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So in defense of security services, am I right? Annie you wanted to respond?

>> ANNIE MACHON: Quickly to the comment that – Snowden is an absolute hero, thank you for exposing the global surveillance state that is being developed by out-of-control rogue intelligence agencies.

But to pick up on the Russian point, this was a claim made by someone who claims to be a former KGB officer living comfortably in the west now. You have to wonder how he works. And it was published in a newspaper called “Sunday people.” It might as well have been published in “Beano.” It’s like Elvis Presley is living on Mars.

But this is dangerous because it picks up on allegations now emerging, saying that Snowden is a traitor and working for the Russians. And they can say this is why he is hiding in Russia. He was in transit that they took his passport away and he got stuck in the airport for over a month.

So it’s an argument that the U.S. Politicians are using to try and smear an innocent whistleblower.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Sir Richard.

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: There is a need for checks and balances, which I support. And in our case the decisions that we make can be subject to judicial review through the courts. That is a proportionate way of doing it.

What concerns me is a much wider issue than the material that we do, which is the capacity that is clearly there for most surveillance, for mass collection of information about individuals. And that’s difficult to challenge, because people don’t know about it much of the time.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So to the floor, sir.

>> AUDIENCE: Hi. Dimitri speaking in a personal capacity. I’d like to make a comment. We want to protect the citizens from terrorists. I have bad news: We can’t. Someone brought up the Boston bombings. I don’t think the Government is there to pro – can protect the citizens. You can see that the Ukrainian Government failed to protect their citizens. The same as until everybody would vaccinate their children, Governments would not still have disease. So, basically, Governments are powerless, with all the information that they have, NSA or another organisation, to act on that information.

One case in point, Ukrainian CERT had the threat of botnet, they identified 98 ISPs that the customers were infected.

One in 98 did something and 90 ignored. So what the Government can do is limited, and I don’t think that collecting information actually helps at all. Basically, it’s all to the people, including, yes, the weapons.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So we are moving into the how specifics. But we have a comment from the floor. Is this a new stream of discussion or a response to current one?

>> AUDIENCE: No. It would be more like a new stream. See if you want to take someone from the panel to respond first.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Any responses? This brings in ISPs. Michael Rotert, you mentioned about the darknet and it was like Government is having a hard time, but so is the private sector having a hard time. It’s not as straightforward as you think.

Do you want to comment on you can’t make them do it if they won’t do it?

>> MICHAEL ROTERT: Well, I can. The dark Web, which you mentioned or which I brought in, in preparation of this session, came to my mind because it’s an area of the Net where no search engines and nothing is going to. It’s like the red light District of a city – of any city in the world. This is one point.

There is another point, if you use anonymizers like Tor, you can go into the dark Web. You will automatically end up in the dark Web and see things which you normally would not see.

And my conclusion was the more Governments are doing and blocking, the more they are forcing people to use maybe anonymizers and stuff like that. Because whatever they block may end up in the dark Web as well. The more they block and filter, the more people are using, unfortunately, unwanted, the dark Web and end up where their computers get infected, where they get Trojans, and whatever weird things are happening with phishing emails and with all of that kind of stuff much.

And this came to my mind as some kind of an Espera, which ends up you block for unwanted content. This went into the dark Web. And people are using more of the dark Web, the more you block. And I think this disturbs this balance as well.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. So we ought to just – okay. Let me – just help me get my head around this.

We have mass surveillance, runaway spies, and blocking that actually creates more problems than it actually solves. So isn’t there at heart here a bit of a myth about some open, beautiful white shining cyberspace where there are no badies? Are we generating a myth of paradise that has been lost? What is going on here? I’m starting to feel concerned often because I have as much of a stake in this conversation as all of us here.

This talk of dark Webs and scary stuff, it’s happening. But on the other hand, we still hang out on our various micro blogs and social networks, we put up our content online. What is at stake? Annie said it’s about giving spy powers. Sir Richard said that there need to be things that law enforcement officers need to enforce the law because there are serious things going on.

And there are a lot of us deeply concerned that our every day life is a tool by which we are being observed.

>> AUDIENCE: Peter Hellmonds, and I have three short points to make. One is on the issue of security being defined as thwarting terrorist attacks. And I think it’s a question of the proportionality of the reaction to that perceived threat. And it’s important, I think, to run statistics. How many people, how many casualties do we have around the globe every year due to terrorist attacks? And put that in perspective with casualties coming from other causes, such as traffic accidents. And what you’ll find is that the number of casualties coming from terrorist attacks is very minor compared to those other threats that we every day assume in our daily lives.

So if you also put that in comparison to the number of terrorist attacks supposedly thwarted by this surveillance, which is a minuscule amount, then the proportionality is completely out of proportion. Because the amount of money spent on the one hand to build up the surveillance and on the other hand the amount of personal freedoms and liberties that we have to give up in order to have that operatus functioning is completely out of proportion to the threat to our lives.

Secondly, the second point is about constitutionality. And if you look at the oath of office that the President of the U.S.takes, it’s not an oath to defend the American people against terrorist attacks. He takes an oath to defend the Constitution. That’s the only oath he takes, to defend the Constitution.

Now what does the Constitution in the U.S.do? It has the Bill of Rights and it defends personal liberties and civil liberties.

And that brings me to the third point, the one that you brought up in your summary, which I fully subscribe to. I think the Internet is our tool as global citizens to defend our freedoms. And we need to do everything to use the Internet in defense of our freedoms, and it will be the best tool.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I think those points of clarification are important.

The Internet is a tool. Can we also think about cyberspace as a place that we go and do things? Can you comment on that, and then the panel will respond.

>> I want to respond about the statement that was made about the dark Web. Using Tordoes not actually take you to the dark Web. There is a difference between sites hosted on the Tor network, which is what Sir meant, and using that against your – anonymity against Government surveillance. That’s why Tor is being used and developed. It’s to protect journalists or whistleblowers or to protect anyone who really is living in suppressive States or really is at a threat of Government surveillance.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. Sir Richard?

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: Just a point on the dark Web point, which I entirely agree and I have no doubt that some of our activity in terms of blocking and removal from the Conventional Web has led to movement to the dark Web. That is not to say that we won’t tackle that. I think we will. But the difficulty, of course, is that as one tackles the next problem, so somebody thinks of some other idea. And what we can do is, as I said at the beginning, we scratched the surface, but we have to scratch a number of different surfaces, which includes the dark Web.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Some of you were wondering whether our definition of “security” is both too narrow and our belief in the security forces too naive.

What about – do you think of a locked home, you think of the statistics that most violence against women, statistically, is happening at home. And that’s very secure. It’s under lock and key, burglar alarms. So what do you think of security from an internalized point of view as well? I’d like to shift us to this quietly and carefully, because we have had big statements about human rights. As an Internet governance principle, this is a great victory, but what does that mean? What does this reiteration of human rights mean? How do we get from the wish list to the do list in a way that makes sense?

So this sounds like a really big question. But my point is we’re talking very much about individuals. Whereas Annie is talking about whole countries. Existential threats. What about ethnic minority communities, LGBT, bloggers, what about them? What about if the place that they added is secure but not safe? So can we talk about shifting from the individual emphasis, and if you have comments about communities and protections and rights. Maybe nobody wants to answer that.

>> XIANHONG HU: Thank you. I’d just like to respond to the question just raised about the protecting journalists. It is really a very complicated task. Maybe you have data. In the past ten years globally there are 600 journalists who were killed for reporting those public reporting, and 90 of those victims, cases, remain unsolved. So it’s a big issue, the issue of the impunity as well.

So we are implementing the UN Interagency Plan of Action. We are just a pilot to this action in four countries, including Nepal, Iraq, Pakistan and (inaudible). It’s really a comprehensive package of the work to do, including creating legal regulatory framework, including creating the capacity building initiative and training. And also we need to network to create a new alert and protection or remedy system. So it’s a really resource consuming. It’s intensive work to do. So that’s what we have done.

But I just, adding and coming to the discussion on the national Governments, the law enforcement on a national security thing, I want to also share an ongoing initiative that the UN is working on. There is a steering Committee on creating a UN wide cyber security and cybercrime policy framework, as a joint initiative of ITU, of UNDP, UNESCO and several other UN agencies to provide the technical assistance to our Member States. I mean, every national Government, to provide a template, a human rights based law based framework to address the cyber security issues.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: One comment from remote participation? Anybody at the moment? Any comments from the floor? Not quite sure – at the back. Thank you very much. Please come to the microphone. Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE: Veronica Snoxell from Nuances Public Affairs.

I’m referring about linking this with literacy, really. Because you mentioned about communities and often that lack of communal literacy, what you call this, empowerment, is often the cause of having, again, that, let’s say, an overpowering representative to either misrepresent or represent accordingly to the linking it all with security and rights.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Give us an explicit example. I brought this thing about communities deliberately. I think a whole part of the world thinks not of a liberal middle class well of techie individuals. This is my pet topic.

>> AUDIENCE: It’s like the tribes down south and the other ones are those in Nigeria who are also, again, you know, misrepresented, basically.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Tell us a bit more – you are talking about the Mondenal Peace Initiatives in terms of their use of the Web?

>> AUDIENCE: They are fairly sort of vocal. But there again, this – what I would say is the polarity of those who would like to, you know, trying to get the clout of putting their views across. There are those issues, still, happening. And it’s just a matter of, again, who has the most connections. And I know, again, branching out to other issues, but these things are happening. Sometimes you would have – there are those in the field who may get that, let’s say, firsthand view. But there again, what is really happening with the core people who have been affected or who are supposed to have been represented.

So there is – the Niger case with (inaudible).I can deal both sides of that. But there again I’m occupying or hogging the whole conference. I don’t want to do that.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. I think these are legitimate questions. We will keep that viewpoint in mind. Avri?

>> AVRI DORIA: One of the groups I work with L dot gay, we work with LGBTQI – hold it.

We work – tippy toes was hard. We work with various LGBTQI communities around the world. And one of the problems we have found are these are endangered communities living in their own environments. In some cases these are communities who basically can only exist on the Internet, because the society is so repressive. But as we start to add the security measure, we find out that those security measures, the use of Tor, the use of VPNs, is actually the flag that goes up that tells the local security forces that here is somebody to go look at. Because once you’re living in a fully repressive society, the VPN methods and the security methods and the Tor actually endanger people. So we’re trying to find new methods where you can actually be secure without look at security.

And one of the fun things we find is that we can steal techniques from the spies of the First World War and such, where you cannot look like you are hiding something. But for these communities that are so endangered and can only exist online, there is that sort of dual probe that we have to deal with.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I would like to sort of, if we can, just develop this a bit. You have a point?

>>I have one point to make for Avri. I think there is power in numbers. If millions of people use VPNs and use Tor, eventually the numbers will be so big that there is no longer a red flag.

>> AVRI DORIA: It will still be a red flag in Uganda.

>> But if all people in Uganda use Tor –

>> AVRI DORIA: Yes, sort of. But not in our lifetimes and it doesn’t help those people – you’re right in a very theoretical sense, if we all do it, there is safety in numbers. Yet it won’t happen. It’s a nice dream, but it won’t happen. It especially won’t happen in the network illiterate or the less network literate places.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Of course, why should people have to use Tor in the first place strikes me is the issue.

I think Jan and then Leonid and then move to the floor.

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: Yes, thank you. I was in a conference once where someone proposed that on the argument that Tor is the access to the dark net, that it should be – that the downloading of Tor should be criminalized. I pleaded guilty.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Oh, likewise.

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: And we don’t have in the Council of Europe a standard agreed by the 47 on the downloading of Tor. But we have many other things. We have about anonymity and about secrecy of communications, and about safeguards when communications are going to be snooped into. And we have Conventions that have been signed by many countries on the protection of children, on the prevention of terrorism and repression of terrorism, on cybercrime. But also, on the protection of personal data. And we have a host of instruments that have been developed that set out the understanding of our 47 Member States in respect of how to protect and how human rights operate on the Internet, in respect of Freedom of Expression, in respect of blocking and filtering. We even have text concerning net neutrality concerning human rights and search engines or social networks and so on and so forth. And a long list of documents.

Many of the things that we have had here are a detail, a detail that has to be explained away. And that the human rights analysis of it gives a very, very clear answer. But this is not the setting for that kind of detailed analysis of every single scenario.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Thank you. So all the instruments are there, they’re just not quite up and going. They’re there, kind of sort of ready to go. But then Leonid and Annie.

>> LEONID TODOROV: Let me disagree a bit.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Briefly.

>> LEONID TODOROV: It was one of our greatest authors who said the severity of law in Russia at least is well compensated, but no need to abide by that.

We heard a lot about everything in here. But the human rights dimension was somehow lost during this discussion. Let me get back to that quickly. Back in 1998, when the U.S. Government sort of handed over certain mandates to the ICANN, it was a different world we lived in. There was no Cold War whatsoever. There was a kind of unipolar world with one super power. No libertarian, so free market and personal freedoms dominated the agenda, and the best and brightest of the Clinton administration were right by saying that Government should no longer be that big.

The pendulum is back now. The Government here – I mean, the Government with capitalized “G” is in full power and full glory these days, make no mistake. There is no room for human rights whatsoever. The paradise has been lost.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: The paradise has been lost.

>> LEONID TODOROV: And we need to get it back. The question is how to do that. Probably by means of this meaningful discussion or somehow –

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Annie and then Jeanette and then Ruth.

>> ANNIE MACHON: This sums up the two previous comments I heard. I’m pleased to hear that people in the Council of Europe are downloading Tor. That’s fabulous. And I hear of the other good work that the EU institutions are trying to start on this front. One way they could move quickly and get rights back for us, we the citizens of Europe, is to incorporate the recommendations of a 13-year-old report that the European Parliament produced in July 2001. This was the Eschelon report. That was the prototype eyes surveillance. All the countries, sharing all their intelligence take and therefore subverting all the accountability rules in each other’s countries. So it was a fabulous system. The Echelon report said that we need to protect the European citizens their basic rights. And to do this, we have to get away from the dependency on closed proprietary US software. We have to use open source software, open standards, develop our own local economies in Europe, build our own infrastructure, and educate our youth in the new areas. Plus, if you have that, it makes the surveillance incredibly difficult to do. And we need that.

At the moment what we have seen with Snowden is, for example, the Tempora programme, where the spies are mainlining all the communications coming across the Atlantic. They are sucking it out of the fibre optic cables. That is everything. And Secretary Hague said it’s okay, I signed it. It’s legal under the UK law. Who is he, the British foreign secretary, to take upon himself the signing away and approving the interceptive communication of 500 million Europeans in 28 different countries?

That is what he has done. We didn’t elect him. Well, the British people didn’t, either.

Look at the Eschelon report and build up our local knowledge base and the take the control away from the American NSA and the American conglomerate giants.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: And the spies. Okay.

(Applause)

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Right now, just bear with us, we are coming to a natural end and I want to flag to the panel that one sentence to finish up with future visions, just to think quickly. From the floor, briefly. And then Ruth who is behind you.

>> AUDIENCE: I’ll try to be more brief than last time.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Be brief. Don’t try. Be brief.

>> AUDIENCE: You asked how, and that is something that we haven’t discussed yet. I would like to encourage everybody to think why we have managed to level security, anonymity, accountability, something that I haven’t heard, a word I haven’t heard today in this session, in the carbon world and why we can’t balance it in the online world. There are underlying principles that we haven’t generated yet in the online world, and that’s the reason why we have other systems, like, for instance, national security systems, are overshooting their competencies,

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Ruth? Point well taken. Ruth.

>> RUTH: Yes, there are some parallels between the arms and weapons trade and with the trade of technologies. We are talking a lot about developing countries and different countries like spying on each other and using – and spying on us and using technology to do that. But we are not talking about where the technology comes from. And a lot of technology that is produced in Europe is exported and Governments in other parts of the world are using that. And I was wondering kind of like, yeah, the kind of the – sorry. Like what restrictions should be on the sort of trading, and also allowing the activists to have access to those technologies in the same time, like how we can balance.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Double standards in terms of exporting cyber warfare tools and then protecting from the tools that were just bought from the EU. I don’t know that we can answer that, Ruth. But it’s important to put on the record.

Any other responses at this point? I’d like to move into the wrap up moment.

And the reason why I’ve thought that is possibly a bit... crazy. But I think part of the Internet is about our future. It’s the younger generations take it for granted that cyberspace is where they go and social media is what they use. If we ended today in a more philosophical bend, I mean that you can change the way that people think about what they think. We moved from individuals to communities to minorities to where the base disguise is not a disguise at all. I’ll ask the panelists in one sentence, it’s called blue skies thinking, sorry.

Before we do that, we have a – what the future vision is of the Web, the Internet, cyberspace.

But before that, just one point from the remote.

>> VIKTOR SZABADOS: Thank you. Romania writes: I think it’s outrageous that Leonid Todorov and Annie Machon complain about freedom in the US and EU, but have no problems with what happened in Russia and China and other countries.

One other question, what do you think about Mr. Putin? Do you think he is a tyrant or Democrat? Thank you.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: You may exercise your right not to answer.

(Laughter)

>>ANNIE MACHON: I think he is a very canny operator and he is outpacing and out thinking President Obama and Cameron and many other western leaders, not only with what is going on in Crimea and the way he stalled another NATO invasion in Syria. He has a great deal of power, and so do the rest of our leaders. And I’m finding it hard to distinguish who abuses state or surveillance power more, is it in Russia or America with the acceptance and help with the facile state from the UK.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: So what is the vision of the future or how do we want to live in the world which is technical, political, economic and social and all the rest? If you want to try, what would be your one sentence vision for the future, just to get us thinking in another frame. Sir Richard? One sentence. Otherwise no. I just have one thing to end.

>> SIR RICHARD TILT: Simply that I think the notion of an entirely free Internet is probably utopian, and someone in the audience said we just have to accept that there are some limits to the freedoms in order to protect other important rights.

I think all of that needs codifying much better than it is at the moment. We need Protocol, International Protocols, and they need to be protected by International institutions.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you.

>> MICHAEL ROTERT: Digital disarmament. That’s what we need and then restart the discussion.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Olivier, digital disarmament. Others can tweet what your future vision is.

>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: While today’s Internet allowed Big Brother to watch you, I hope that tomorrow’s Internet allows you to watch Big Brother.

(Applause)

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Continuing.

>> My recommendation for the future would be to assert human rights. Every time there is a violation and interference, assert your rights. In order to facilitate, the Council of Europe has adopted all these texts, including more recently a guide on the rights of Internet users, from a human rights perspective. Assert your rights. If you don’t do it, if we don’t do it collectively, we may end up on a 21st century Gulag.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: And your one sentence?

>>LEONID: A message from the former Gulag. I believe it is through enlightenment, education, and commitment and passion to those values we hold dear, no matter what my Romanian opponent would say.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Leonid.

And Annie?

>> ANNIE MACHON: I would highlight one special right, which is the right to privacy. Enshrined in 1948 for a good reason and in the immediate aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. And if we don’t take steps, individually, to ensure privacy – and we can on the Internet. We can use open source software, we can use Tor, use encryption – and respect other’s rights to privacy, by so doing, then we will lose our very foundation for Democracy. That is the nature of privacy.

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Speaking of freedom, I think right now this kind of myth that we are voluntarily and also when we talk about young people they are voluntarily participating in the surveillance system when they use Facebook and Google, and so on. My wish for the future is that this young generation has an alternative business or services built on alternative business models, alternative technical structures that actually protect their right to privacy, rather than forcing them to participate or not. That’s the only alternative right now.

>> XIANHONG HU: I would like to conclude by quoting the remarks of the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Ban KiMoon. He said that “national security and the criminal activity may justify some exceptional and tailored use of surveillance. But that is all the more reason to safeguard human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I would like to end with the words of a poet, W.B. Yates, “Tread softly because you tread on my dream” is graffitied on the third lamppost. But I looked up the poem because I forgot. I’ll quote from him. It’s half a minute.

“Had I heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

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Security, Internet principles and human rights – PL 05 2014

Contents

Session description

What

How & Who

Futures

Format and Key Participants

Preparatory meetings and thematic inputs

Protocol. Discussions

Further reading

Messages

Video Record

Transcript

Pictures from working group

Session twitter hashtag

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Security, Internet principles and human rights – PL 05 2014

Session description

What

How & Who

Futures

Format and Key Participants

Preparatory meetings and thematic inputs

Protocol. Discussions

Further reading

Messages

Video Record

Transcript

Pictures from working group

Session twitter hashtag

Navigation menu

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