In what way is Edward Snowden a "human rights defender"?

Great Debates
1

In this article from the New York Times, one learns that Human Rights Watch representative Tanya Lokshina believes he is a human rights defender. Further, “Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (said) there should be greater protections for Mr. Snowden and others like him who disclose human rights violations”. (emphasis added)

At the outset, let me state that this post is not about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor, or whether what he did was right or wrong. I am only questioning his new status as a human rights defender.

Which human rights is he defending? What human rights have been violated?

Is ‘privacy’ a human right? If so, it is clearly not absolute since police, governments, etc., may, on occasion (and after obtaining proper authorization), tap phones, surreptitiously film, and so forth, quite legally.

With respect to what Snowden has disclosed, is it a human right to have one’s telephone “metadata” kept confidential? Is indiscriminate collection and analysis of such data a human rights violation? Is it a violation when the government photographs the back and front of literally each and every piece of personal mail in the US (and then collates the results)? Only if it is, can Snowden even be considered to be a champion of human rights.

But, no, it is not a violation of a human right to look at the addresses on envelopes. By definition, the addresses on letters and envelopes are there for anyone to see (and record). In exactly the same way, telephone metadata is not private - indeed, as the NYT article notes, the courts have ruled that telephone metadata “amounts to the same thing (as addresses on envelopes)”. Since it is inconceivable to make confidential the addresses on envelopes, there can be no violation of human rights in the government’s recording of them. The letter writer has consented to relinquish any expectation of privacy when he posts the letter. His rights are not being violated. The same reasoning applies to telephone metadata.

It is disingenuous to call Snowden a human rights defender and it is equally contrived to call confidentiality of telephone metadata a human right. Snowden may be a hero, or he may be a traitor, or maybe even nothing but a glory-seeking martyr. But he is no defender of human rights.

2

Yes, and yes. It is a human right, and it is not absolute.

One who considers privacy to be an imperiled right might celebrate Snowden’s actions in highlighting this peril. There are other viewpoints: some of us hold that Snowden committed an impermissible act in the course of his whistle-blowing. He could have exposed the fact of privacy violations without also exposing specific details.

It’s a matter of opinion. Your politics may be different than another person’s. The courts can tell us if he actually broke the law, but, in the meantime, we’re all entitled to our personal beliefs about whether or not he broke the law.

3

Allow me to question you back. Was there “proper authorization” in most of these cases, or simply Gov spying because they could? If so, welcome to George Orwell’s 1984 – legal or not.

Say good bye to privacy.

4

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Snowden and his team are trying to make the case that he is exposing abuses of the system that violate the spirit of article 12. European allies who can be spied on by the NSA with no warrant certainly might be justified in thinking this is “arbitrary interference with their privacy”. The NSA leaks have been about a lot more than metadata so your point about that is irrelevant.

You might make the case he is campaigning for unrealistic human rights that don’t exist anywhere on the planet and never have done, but still that seems to be the angle his team is taking.

5

You are correct. No right is absolute. All are circumscribed to some extent.

Generally we are ok with this to some extent. The old you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire and expect to defend yourself on free speech grounds sort of thing.

That said there ARE limits to government power (or should be). We do have rights and the issue here is that the government has gone too far in trampling on those rights.

I could abide by the NSA intrusions IF (note he big “if”) there were meaningful and real safeguards on their use of power. The way it is now they pretty much have carte blanche. What little window dressing of oversight is left (FISA court) is a farce. FISA has done absolutely zero to be any kind of check on this power.

Who watches the watchers? Our government was setup on a system of checks and balances. While that ostensibly still exists it has been whittled down to near meaninglessness these days.

6

I think the important thing that Snowden has revealed is not any particular capability but rather the debate over how these capabilities will be used. And they will be used because they are too useful not to be used. It isn’t so much that the government is using these abilities in a bothersome way right now but rather what a future government could do with these abilities if they were so inclined. The potential for abuse is vast and safeguards have to be strong because it is laughable to imagine any government voluntarily giving up this amount of power.

7

Other links:

It’s not just metadata:
Also, the NSA, “intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON”. From WAPO: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-15/news/39993852_1_comey-national-intelligence-intelligence-collection

Interesting, I’m not aware of any restrictions the NSA faces on monitoring those who are not US citizens. I’m not aware of any restrictions the British intelligence services face with regards to those not servant’s of Her Majesty’s crown. I’m not aware on any restrictions on intelligence agencies trading information. Quite the contrary: I understand for example that the Italian spooks were involved in the Niger Yellowcake hoax, which rebounded to the benefit of US citizens intent on invading Iraq.

In other words, surveillance of foreigners is in no way limited to metadata and furthermore everyone is a foreigner.

8

Thanks for your comments.

I think that coremelt nicely phrased what I was trying to say:

In other words, it is almost as if the definition of ‘human rights’ is being revised retrospectively in order to promote the meme that Snowden is defending them. As I said above, I think that is disingenuous and more than contrived.

9

I don’t think there’s any significance at all to anything he revealed about our capabilities or how these capabilities will be used. Everybody who cares about this already knew it it was happening, or at least were sure it was happening even if they didn’t pay attention 12 years ago, or just because they’re paranoid about such things. Everybody else already forgot about this story because of a plane crash, televised trial, Sharknado, and/or the weather.

10

I stand to be corrected, but capturing the content of a call of a US citizen requires a court order. That is different than collecting metadata on a number of levels.

Whether the US is violating the rights of non-US citizens by its monitoring is a fair question.

11

(Karl: I’m actually haven’t investigated this story in any sort of depth.)

So, you are saying that there is a human right to privacy but it does not apply in this case, right?

My take is that after a certain point a change in quantity becomes a change in quality. It’s one thing to lift mailing metadata by hand when instructed to do so by the FBI. It’s quite another to record all mailing metadata and give any official carte blanche to troll the dataset. 4+ orders of magnitude can make a difference. This stuff needs to be reviewed.

12

What? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I quoted was composed in 1948. They are meant to be an ideal. You can make a case that no country has ever lived up to all of them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are the most widely recognized definition of Human Rights.

13

I’m curious (I really do not know):

In, say, 1980 could the NSA or FBI go to AT&T and demand your phone records without a warrant? That would be metadata…they are not listening in to your calls. Just seeing who you called and for how long you talked to them and so on.

Apart from that I am not sure why you think the metadata is innocuous and not worth protecting. Would you care if they noted (made up example) in a file that you visited chase.com then straightdope.com then chickswithdicks.com? Maybe you are running for office and someone quietly pulls you aside and tells you that such things have a way of leaking out.

14

Yes[sup]2[/sup]. However (and, I admit have not thought this through), I would say that the right to privacy is essentially a by-product of other, more fundamental rights, i.e. the right to free speech, assembly, freedom of thought. In other words, one’s speech or thoughts are not free in some sense if they are being monitored. This begins to merge also with ‘protection from unreasonable search and seizure’ but, again, so long as the* content* is protected, I see no violation.

I think this is pivotal - does widespread, indiscriminate monitoring create something new or is it just being arbitrary to say there is some point at which a threshold has been exceeded and, voila, a violation has occurred? Seems to me that it’s “all or none”.

15

Oh, yes, I would care. But I’m not sure it’s a human right not to be so monitored. At least not in the “traditional” use of the phrase.

My point is only that I think calling Snowden a defender of human rights is a stretch (and not that what the NSA did is necessarily good or evil, or illegal).

16

I should also note the NSA is collecting a helluva lot more info than metadata.

That is waaaay more than is needed for metadata. Orders of magnitude more.

One zettabyte would be 62.5 billion iPhones. Stacked up those phones would reach past the moon. Put another way:

In short, they are certainly going for a LOT more than your metadata which would not fill a more than a tiny fraction of that storage.

17

I can’t counter that except to say that “real world” human rights, the ones typically associated with “defenders” or “champions”, seem fewer than those you cite. Fewer and less controversial (for example, not containing “positive” rights such as the right to an education, or food, etc.)

18

KarlGauss,

The technology to store ALL phone and internet metadata for months or years and make it accessible on demand has only existed for a few years. Before then the storage costs and amount of computational power needed would have made it prohibitive even for the NSA. Maybe we need to have a new debate over what the Human Right to privacy actually entails in light of the new technology?

Edit: where is this list of ‘real world’ human rights you are talking about? AFAIK the UNDHR is pretty widely accepted, please provide a cite to your real world list.

19

Indeed. It gets back to what Measure for Measure asked a few posts ago (about quantity having a quality all of its own ;)) to which my quick response was that any threshold would seem to be arbitrary. In other words, an excellent topic for debate!

ETA: The best I can do re: a cite for “real world” rights is to point to the idea of positive versus negative rights (and I think the negative rights are more “traditional” and less controversial).

20

Leaving aside the privacy issue, I think there’s also a basic human right to have the rule of law in effect. And that applies to the government as well as to individuals. The government should not merely enforce the law; it should also be subject to the law.