Human Rights Principles and Communications Surveillance

The International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance was cooperatively written by privacy organizations and advocates around the world.  I'm posting the full statement (for which the Electronic Frontier Foundation created a website) for itself but also, since we're a resource blog here, for the list of signatures on the document which gives a nice roundup of key groups active in this international concern. The hyperlinked list of  224 "Signatories" follows the fairly brief series of statements.

Publishing these principles is not the end of the conversation by any means. The site also collects news articles and essays from contributors worldwide about the Principles-- reactions to, discussions about, etc.

April CommQuote

Since April is Poetry Month a poem is in order, one from Andrei Codrescu called the new gazette. It's from his collection, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, which I recommend picking up because Codrescu is not only a good poet, he's one of the giants. When looking for a copy of the poem to post I stumbled upon this 2006 NPR radio interview with Robert Siegel (excerpted below the poem), Codrescu talking about this very piece.

the new gazette 

I want to be the publisher of a vicious illuminated newspaper.

All the viciousness in it will be gold-leafed, raised and colored-in

by art students with medieval bodies.

The bend of their heads and the angle of their breasts
will outlast sunset

to exchange body with Chartres.

My writers will hate everything
with passion, fervor and murderous disregard for their safety

which will take in writing the form of classical tragedy.

Sophocles will be movie reviewer, Richard Speck desk editor.

Euripides and Charles Manson will be in charge of the clergy.

The translators under penalty of death will have to be faithful.

In the office only foreign languages will be spoken.
Faithfulness and alienness will be the order of day and night

since they will succeed each other on the front page.

The paper will appear twice a day, four times a night.

The readers will be mean, nervous and ready to kill for the cause.

There will be plenty of causes, one for every hour, and in later
issues, one for every minute,

The causes will be biological and spiritual and they will incite
war for molecular differences.

Molecular terrorists in hiding will write letters to the editor.
Two persons, a man and a woman, called Tolerance and Intolerance,
will be in charge of love and lights.                 
--by Andrei Codrescu

From: Virtual Privacy: A Myth of the 21st Century, November 03, 2006 4:00 PM, National Public Radio

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:In some ways, Commentator Andrei Codrescu is a member of the avant garde. Take a poem he wrote back in 1973, which looked ahead to the rise of blogs.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I wrote a poem called The New Gazette that said, among other things, I want to be the publisher of a vicious, illuminated newspaper. The paper will appear twice a day, four times a night. The readers will be mean, nervous and ready to kill for the cause. There will be plenty of causes, one for every hour and in later issues, one for every minute. The causes will be biological and spiritual, and they will incite war for molecular differences. Molecular terrorists in hiding will write letters to the editor. Two persons, a man and a woman called Tolerance and Intolerance, will be in charge of love and lights.

I've quoted at length from this youthful work not only because it proves that I'm a prophet, but also because I used to write pretty great poetry. Looking back on early work is not advisable though, just as it isn't advisable to look back into the past when one was vital, strong, blustery and brilliant. Truly, youth is wasted on the young, but only if one looks back. The past is a mirror that shimmers and draws the soul in. More people die everyday from falling into the mirror of the past than fall from horses or get snuffed in car crashes.

Anyway, when I wrote that poem, I had no clue that in 2006 every person alive on earth would be able to broadcast their most intimate thoughts everyday into a new public nervous system that collects every human now. Back in 1973 I still suffered from the trauma of childhood under a totalitarian government who looked into every thought of its subjects and used that knowledge to terrify and belittle us. Surveillance was a bad thing. Privacy was sacred.

In 2006, we still hold privacy to be a right and we pay lip service to it. In reality, privacy means little in the age of personal computing. Anyone can find out in minutes all they need to know about you and everyone is ready to broadcast everything anyone might want to know. The desire to expose everything one feels or experiences and the need to translate all of it immediately into an urgent bulletin is an inexorable process, a progressive disease that leads to the foreshadowing of every difference. Every half-baked thought or passing incidence takes on a personality, a body for consumption.

Bloggers produce molecular bodies blown up like balloons with significance. This type of communication is not friendly to threat, a form of rape maybe. Of course, you don't have to read anybody's blog or submit to the increasingly epileptic flicker of television, but you are hooked. There's no escaping it. If you were born before the time when communication was compulsory, you might be tempted to look to a more innocent past and then you'll fall in it, blinded like a bird.

Rights in Data Handbook

As John Wilks and Alec Christie, editors of the RIGHTS IN DATA HANDBOOK, explain, there has been a lot of attention focused on data privacy and data protection (indeed their team at DLA Piper issued a handbook on the subject in March of last year, Data Protection Laws of the World Handbook), but "the issue of IP rights in data and databases has traditionally received almost no attention." The RIGHTS Handbook (January 2013 edition) is here to fill the gap.

This handbook provides a high-level summary, with links to relevant sources of  the different types of protection which are available for data and databases in 12 key global jurisdictions. For each jurisdiction we consider three categories of  database which may benefit from protection: original databases, databases in which investment has been made, and confidential databases. --Introduction

Besides the three categories of databases for each global jurisdiction, Significant Recent Cases relating to database rights are cited as well as Upcoming Legislative Changes. Each area of jurisdiction concludes with "Top Tips for Database Owners"--obviously useful for potential database owners but interesting as well to outsiders (academics dare we say?) looking to get a sense of what the issues are comparatively. 

Facebook: A Profile of Friends

A snapshot of Facebook users, Facebook: A Profile of its 'Friends, is composed of data highlights from  the last few years of research done at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  "The project has been surveying people who use social media to explore how they use it and what they get out of it. Highlights from the surveys paint a portrait of what kind of people use sites such as Facebook, who they connect to and how they manage their privacy." As you read down through the featured points (such as "80% of Facebook user requests are accepted") you can click on the link to the rest of the report. There appear to be five "feeder" reports to this profile. 

Congressional Research Report on Government Cell Phone Tracking

A recent  Congressional Research Report Governmental Tracking of Cell Phones and Vehicles: The Confluence of Privacy, Technology and the Law has just been released.


Summary
This report will briefly survey Fourth Amendment law as it pertains to the government's tracking programs. It will then summarize federal electronic surveillance statutes and the case law surrounding cell phone location tracking. Next, the report will describe the GPS-vehicle tracking cases and review the pending Supreme Court GPS tracking case, United States v. Jones. Finally, the report will summarize the geolocation and electronic surveillance legislation introduced in the 112th Congress.

Internet as Public Commons

The current issue of Daedalus (Volume 140, Issue 4, Fall 2011) is titled: Protecting the Internet as a Public Commons. Explains editor David D. Clark, "This issue is concerned with the experience of using the Internet: how its character shapes the user experience and how our collective online participation raises larger societal and political questions."

Articles:

What are the Consequences of Being Disconnected in a Broadband-Connected World?

A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online

Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance?

Safety in Cyberspace

Doctrine for Cybersecurity

Reconceptualizing the Role of Security User

Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet

Who Speaks? Citizen Political Voice on the Internet Commons

Prosocial Behavior on the Net

WikiLeaks and the Protect-ip Act: A New Public-Private Threat to the Internet Commons

The issue is available from Penn Library e-resources

World Privacy Forum

If you're interested in privacy issues you might want to bookmark the World Privacy Forum site. Devoted to issues of privacy in all arenas, including medical, job security, and financial privacy, it also has a section devoted to search engine and internet privacy. These sections are post news briefs as well as full research reports from a variety of perspectives. The resource section post reports, WPF speeches delivered around the world, tips and FAQs on privacy, and links to other privacy organizations, centers, publications, and related blogs. As well as the site is already organized it also has an A-Z Index featuring reports and documents on categories such as Advertising and Online Privacy, Communications, Cloud Computing, Email, e-health, Identity, Internet Privacy, Press, and Search Engines--to name the more media-related.

The World Privacy Forum is a nonprofit, non-partisan 501 (C) (3) public interest research group founded in 2003 focused on conducting in-depth research, analysis, and consumer education in the area of privacy.

BBC , Bush Free Speech Legacy, The Satanic Verses at 20

The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television' s last issue of 2008 (Volume 28, Issue 4) is devoted entirely to the BBC. This special issue is titled: BBC World Service, 1932-2007: Cultural Exchange and Public Diplomacy. In honor of the BBC celebrating its 75th year in broadcasting a conference was held in December 2007 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London to reflect on three quarters of a century of overseas broadcasting from Britain. "Organised by the ARHC-funded Open University research project, 'Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service', it brought together broadcasters, academics and policy-makers to engage in a series of debates about the World Service. The papers in this special issue...are drawn from that conference and will, it is hoped, add to the development of a critical mass that will ensure, in future, the history of international broadcasting receives the academic and public attention and understanding it deserves" (from the Introduction by Marie Gillepsie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann).

Index on Censorship (Volume 37, Number 4, 2008) assesses the future of free speech in the United States in the wake of the Bush era: Eric Lichtblau on the White House's wiretapping program, Patrick Radden Keefe on executive power, Jameel Jaffer on the remaining secrets of the Bush administration, Rich Piltz on climate change, Geoffry Stone on war and speech, Zoriah Miller on image control, Lawrence Krauss on intelligent design, Christopher Finan on monitoring libraries and reading habits, and more.

In this same issue is a special section honoring the 20th anniversary of a free speech watershed, the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Publisher Peter Mayer, Nadine Gordimer, Malise Ruthven, and others weigh in.

Both journals are available from the Penn Libraries page.

Future of Reputation

In the Future of Reputation (Yale, 2007) Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, looks at gossip in all its nternet manifestations--issues of publicity, shame, and how we can protect our own reputations. Solove believes that "long-standing notions of privacy need review" and that "unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free."
--publisher's website

But why do I give this book its own blog post, besides the fact that it's very well-reviewed? Because it's available in fulltext online for free (as well as from Yale University Press, Amazon, etc.). The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States license.

January journal roundup

A few end of year 2007 special issues to point out:

The fourth issue of Social Semiotics (Volume 17, December 2007) is heavily devoted to Michael Jackson (Framing Michael Jackson: Celebrity on Trial) exploring "many questions about celebrity scandal, cultural performance and identity, intersecting with ideas about race, gender and sexuality," according to Jenny Kitzinger and Sujata Moorti in the issue's Introduction.

Communication Research and the Study of Surveillance is the topic of The Communication Review (Volume 10, Number 4, 2007), edited by Kelly Gates and Shoshana Magnet.

Paul J. Lavrakas edits Public Opinion Quarterly's (Volume 71, Number 5, 2007) special issue titled: Cell Phone Numbers and Telephone Surveying in the U.S. While the issue focuses on the use of cell phones in surveys, it leads off with a historical piece on two of the most influential researchers on survey methods with telephones, Warren Mitofsky and Joseph Waksberg.

The Journal of Mass Media Ethics, which explores questions of media morality, devotes a special issue (Volume 22, Number 7, 2007) to the question, "Who Is a Journalist?" Edited by Wendy Wyatt, the issue features an interesting article on the role of "fake news" (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) in media criticism, among others.

And while not a theme issue, Comm history buffs should check out Critical Studies in Media Communication's (Volume 24, Number 5, 2007) Critical Forum which is devoted to Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American Mind with short pieces by Jack Lule, Sue Curry Jansen, David Park, Jefferson Pooley, and Peter Simonson, followed by a response to the contributors from Czitrom himself.

Pew Reports: Teens and Social Media, Digital Footprints

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has recently published Teens and Social Media (December, 2007), a report that describes how teenagers make use of social networking tools to communicate. The full 35-page report is freely available, along with the five-page summary of findings preceding it. From the summary:

64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004:
--39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
--33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
--28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
--27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
--26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
The percentage of those ages 12-17 who said "yes" to at least one of those five content-creation activities is 64% of online teens, or 59% of all teens.

Another Pew Report, Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency, is also available in full. It reports that "most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online."