This is a guest post by Renata Avila from the World Wide Web Foundation, Javier Ruiz from Open Rights Group and Fabrizio Scollini from DATA Uruguay who will be facilitating the OKFestival Session Open Surveillance?. Get your tickets here and join the conversation in Berlin.
The Open Government and the Open Data movements have brought an enormous contribution to transparency and accountability over the last decade. Citizens, working together with their governments, have accessed and used big datasets, contributing to economic and public interest gains.
Illustration by Xpectro
Data collection has exploded both in the private and public sectors. But in the area of ¨national security,” such activities are taking place in secret, without proper mechanisms of oversight and accountability. It is almost impossible for citizens of most countries to review how effective those programs are, or the public expenditure around it. Where available, FOIA mechanisms tend not to be very helpful..
As a community we have failed to pay attention and measure an important phenomenon closely connected to the Snowden revelations: the expansion of the deep State since 9/11. The shadow State composed by those with top security clearance, who can access information the ordinary citizen can´t, has grown in both size and importance. Even boundaries between public and private sector are now blurred. Transnational security contractors have access to information beyond the reach of lawmakers or even heads of State. Surveillance is a very profitable business, and one of the most obscure as security contractors are protected by multiple layers, such as trade secrets, hard confidentiality agreements and national security exceptions.
In the United States of America, reports indicate that there are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. 5.1 M Americans have security clearance. In Australia the number of staffers with security clearance increased from 15,000 to 350,000, in 15 years Europe is not immune either to the unaccountable increase in secrecy, covering up grave human rights abuses, such as the EU role in Secret Prisons and extraordinary renditions. Spying agencies in most European countries are weakly regulated and try to emulate the NSA, only limited by their more modest technical and financial means, the UK being an exceptional case.
Mass surveillance everywhere is generally agreed in secret, approved, when any judicial intervention is permitted at all, by secret courts and mechanisms with little oversight. Part of the democratic deficit could be due to the nominal focus of most mass surveillance programmes on citizens of other countries. But claims by some governments that the communications of their own innocent citizens are not collected, stored and analysed retrospectively have not stood scrutiny. In any case, these double standards are increasingly unacceptable in the context of the internet. In Europe, the indiscriminate mass collection of communications data from whole populations has been found incompatible with human rights.
Secrecy, the ¨National Security¨ wall that impedes citizens to penetrate the deep State, has exploded just as openness, transparency, accountability and active citizenship are embraced by governments. But how can we speak of open government with such extreme asymmetry of information? How can we advance citizen participation when every online activity is potentially under surveillance? And those exercising their right to privacy through the use of encryption technologies are seen as potential suspects. Declassification is too slow. Secret Mass Surveillance is harming our democracies, international stability and relations and presents a very real threat to peace.
During the OKFest we aim to engage in the beginning of a necessary and urgent conversation for the open communities about some of the following issues: How can we solve the problem of Private Data Open to Governments, Public Interest Data closed to citizens, how can we fix our metrics and methods for the Open Government Partnership so to look into measuring not only which information is released, but also what is kept secret. Moreover how can we fix the problem of prolonged secrecy of sensitive documents – declassification happens where perpetrators are no longer accountable. Ar last we will discuss the vital importance of whistleblowers and the worrying persecution without precedent they are suffering.
The ultimate question central to our movement is : how should we address illegal surveillance from an open government perspective? How should the open government community react to threats to privacy and other fundamental human rights?
Let´s start the conversation
Illustration by Xpectro
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