Internet and democracy

A new report wants to foster a digital age underpinned by human rights and calls for greater transparency from global giants. But will we ever trust the internet?

This week in the Hague, a high-level group of 29 internet policymakers and influencers – including prominent ex-US and UK security and intelligence officials Michael Chertoff, Joseph Nye, Melissa Hathaway and David Omand – issued a clarion call for the protection and promotion of human rights online. Self-styled the Global Commission on Internet Governance, the group made this call as part of the broader objective of restoring trust and confidence in the internet.

Championing our fundamental human rights to privacy and personal data protection, the commission affirmed the need for strong encryption and other privacy-enhancing technologies, while completely rejecting government “backdoors” on communications platforms – on the basis that digital communications “should be inherently considered private between the intended parties”.

This clear and unambiguous statement is a mature recognition of both the environmental and legal reality: if we weaken security, even for the ostensibly “good” guys, we leave communications wide open for the bad guys, too. And while the UK Intelligence and Security Committee would prefer it otherwise, generic intrusion on our private communications, thoughts and papers has no precedent in the law of this land – and so it must stay.

The commission didn’t stop with just proposing measures to rein in unjust government surveillance that lacks necessity and proportionality, backed up by robust, independent oversight and the stick of appropriate redress and effective remedies for breach.

They insisted that companies, too, must be much more transparent and restrained in their use of data, offering users full and detailed information and real and informed choices, particularly in relation to the trade-offs inherent in “free” services – “often a guise for a kind of private surveillance in the service of ‘big data’,” the report states. This dual focus, on the dangers of both government and corporate surveillance, is refreshing and essential.

A new normative framework underpinned by human rights

The commission’s 18-page report is the first coordinated output from this group that was established 15 months ago by British and Canadian think-tanks, Chatham House and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and chaired by ex-Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt. It precedes a final report anticipated for early 2016, and accompanies some 14 independent papers of varying quality, commissioned on different related topics over the past year.

The report is an important advance because it considers and balances the need for citizen confidence in digital communications and services, while at the same recognising our shared interest in law enforcement and targeted surveillance.

As a result of this, it comes out firmly on the side of transparency, accountability, restraint, and the primacy of human rights.

“The obligation of states to protect and promote rights to privacy and freedom of expression are not optional,” the report states. “Even if they are not absolute rights, limitations to these rights, even those based on national security concerns, must be prescribed by law, guaranteeing that exceptions are both necessary and proportionate. Governments should guarantee the same human rights protection to all individuals within their borders.”

The report is also attuned to the more insidious aspects of private commercial surveillance, recognising, for example, that the evolving internet of things poses unprecedented challenges for privacy and security and must proceed with transparency, accountability, and clear legal bases for data collection and use.

“Personal data protection regulations are mostly not yet suited to the complexity of the digital age,” the authors write, “for example, by not adequately regulating the extensive secondary use of personal data or ensuring the transparency of exceptions to privacy for sovereignty and national security purposes.”

Social compacts, multistakeholderism and other illusions

The group’s overall ambition is to articulate and advance a strategic vision on the polarising and widely-misunderstood topic of internet governance.

Narrowly conceived, internet governance concerns internet-native bodies, such as ICANN (the private company with a monopoly on domain name distribution and regulation) and IETF (an internet standards body).

But more broadly, internet governance is the biggest geoeconomic and geopolitical battlefield you’ve never heard about – dictating the rules, emperors, winners and losers of our online lives, fortunes and destinies.