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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 19 giugno 2014 alle ore 16:49.
L'ultima modifica è del 15 ottobre 2014 alle ore 14:15.

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In the UK, public and parliamentary debate on surveillance practices has been minimal, at best. And not only does Canadian law prohibit companies from reporting virtually any information about government requests for data; Prime Minister Stephen Harper has nominated a lawyer who spent his career advising intelligence agencies to serve as an official privacy commissioner, raising the ire of activists.

Some countries have even intensified their surveillance activities. Immediately following the Snowden revelations, the French government snuck into a military appropriations bill the authority to increase government surveillance of the Internet dramatically, including for commercial reasons. The of the mass surveillance practiced by the UK, Sweden, France, and Germany (and potentially soon by the Netherlands) seems not to carry much weight for national governments.

With the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta this month, Snowden’s revelations have also fueled a new movement to create country-specific Internet bills of rights establishing the principles of privacy, free speech, and responsible anonymity. In a at the United Nations last September, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff placed her country at the forefront of this movement by promoting Brazil’s historic bill.

But the proposed bill included the requirement that Internet companies keep their servers in Brazil – purportedly to protect information from American intelligence agencies’ prying eyes – while easing access to these data for Brazil’s own law-enforcement and security agencies. Fortunately, Brazil’s legislators kept these provisions out of the final Marco Civil, which in April.

Alas, other governments are threatening to impose similar forced data-localization requirements. Such rules run not only contrary to the fundamental principles of an open and interconnected Internet infrastructure; they also create new privacy risks. And they do nothing to solve the basic problem of restricting government access to personal data held by private companies.

How companies worldwide respond to Snowden’s revelations will have a profound impact on their users’ rights. So far, some have taken the right approach, pressing for greater transparency, while strengthening encryption on their networks to keep intelligence agencies out.

Companies throughout the information and communication technology sector have started to make transparency reports an industry standard. But more telecommunications companies and hardware manufacturers should join Internet companies and privacy rights advocates to build a broad reform coalition.

A year ago, Snowden alerted the world to governments’ egregious violation of people’s privacy. It is up to the technology industry, civil-society organizations, and the general public to keep governments honest in pursuing much-needed reforms. Only then can the Internet provide the boon to freedom that it has long promised.

Mark Stephens is Independent Chair of the .

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014.

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