INTRODUCTION

By early 2013, visibility of the Internet and human rights was increasing in the HRC and related UN human rights processes. Activists were developing tools to protect emerging new rights (such as rights to encryption and anonymity), and calling for strengthened rights for LGBTQI+ people through initiatives such as the feminist principles for the Internet. In following up his earlier work, Frank La Rue was investigating the use of technologies for state surveillance, and I attended the HRC in June to support the presentation of his latest report. While I was there, a story broke about mass surveillance: a story that would not only catapult human rights into the digital age, but also set the technical community on a collision course with human rights communities. This chapter outlines how these revelations about mass surveillance led to the international human rights system developing, with the help of human rights and technical communities, new concepts of privacy, and new definitions of human rights violations in the digital age.

SURVEILLANCE AND THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers simultaneously published a story that would shock the world. Based on documents leaked by a former United States National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, the story was an exposé of a vast cell phone surveillance system operated by the government of the United States of America. Documents showed ‘for the first time’ that, under the Obama administration, the communication records of millions of US citizens were being collected ‘indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing’. An order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (a court closed to the public) had granted unlimited authority for the FBI to collect, for three months, not only the contents of telephone communications, but all related call records or ‘telephony metadata’ from within the US, and between the US and overseas. The revelations showed how vulnerable the average Internet user's communications were to interception. The intelligence agencies’ surveillance strategy was simple: ‘collect it all’.