EU SURVEILLANCE: A summary of current EU surveillance and security measures
“The purpose of this booklet is to briefly outline current EU surveillance and security measures in order to give an insight into their scale and cumulative effect. In order to be legal under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, each security measure that limits fundamental rights is understood to be effective and a ‘necessary’ and ‘proportionate’ breach of the rights which our society considers to be fundamental.”
Author: Joe McNamee, Advocacy Coordinator, Kirsten Fiedler & Marie Humeau, Advocacy Managers & Daniel Dimov, intern. European Digital Rights.
The study is available for download here.
You can also check “An introduction to DATA PROTECTION“. Or the comic book “Under Surveillance“.
Anonymity, Privacy, and Security Online
“86% of adult internet users have taken steps from time to time to avoid surveillance by other people or organizations when they were using the internet. Despite their precautions, 21% of online adults have had an email or social media account hijacked and 11% have had vital information like Social Security numbers, bank account data, or credit cards stolen—and growing numbers worry about the amount of personal information about them that is available online.”
Released by Pew Internet & American Life Project. It is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.
The report is available for download here.
You can also take a look at: Privacy and Data Management on Mobile Devices, Privacy management on social media sites and many more other research reports about the digital habits of the US population.
The Challenges of Data Retention: Now and in the Future
“The European Data Retention Directive was written to ensure that telecom providers would retain certain data, to be made available to the police for the purpose of crime detection, investigation and prosecution. However, the Directive did not take into account the heterogeneous nature of the networks and systems of most telecom providers. This complication has made it difficult for companies to meet the Directive obligations and it is anticipated that formidable challenges will grow over time.”
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting firm, has published in 2010 a whitepaper that identifies and analyses these challenges, which extend well beyond Europe.
Studies on anonymity. A bibliography
Free Haven is a project which began in December 1999 as a research project initially comprised of several MIT students. It aims to deploy a system for distributed, anonymous, persistent data storage which is robust against attempts by powerful adversaries to find and destroy any stored data. This model of decentralized system has been classified as peer-to-peer by recent popular media. Besides this, the members of the project have put together and exhaustive list of studies on surveillance and anonymity, starting all the way from the 70’s.
For those of you with technical skills, this is a good reading list that will keep you busy for quite a long time!
Do NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?
“On June 5, 2013, the Guardian broke the first story in what would become a flood of revelations regarding the extent and nature of the NSA’s surveillance programs. Facing an uproar over the threat such programs posed to privacy, the Obama administration scrambled to defend them as legal and essential to U.S. national security and counterterrorism. Two weeks after the first leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published, President Obama defended the NSA surveillance programs during a visit to Berlin, saying: ‘We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved.‘
However, our review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even misleading.”
Read the whole study here.
Authors: Peter Bergen, David Sterman, Emily Schneider, and Bailey Cahall
Released by the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.