Abstract
Privacy and digital freedom were key topics of debate in Germany’s general election campaign. And the same issues are set to dominate a big chunk of European and international political debate through the autumn when the European Union’s leaders will be discussing a range of digital issues, from competitiveness to privacy to free expression online.
And, in parallel, various major international summits loom – on digital freedom, internet governance and cybersecurity. The ambitious EU-US talks on a transatlantic free trade area are already getting tangled up in these debates too.
Opposition politicians have labelled Angela Merkel and her allies too weak in their response to the US
But will all this summitry, negotiations and political debate benefit digital freedom of expression? And in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about major US and UK mass surveillance and snooping programmes, as well as leaks and allegations about similar programmes in France, Sweden and Germany too, can Europe lead on digital freedom any more?
As these crucial political debates unfold in the months ahead, we may start to see the answers to these questions.
It was Snowden’s revelations of US mass surveillance that brought privacy and digital freedom to the heart of Germany’s election campaign. With memories still fresh of Stasi monitoring of the East German population, the debate in Germany has been fierce. Opposition politicians have labelled Angela Merkel and her allies too weak in their response to the US, and the German media has persistently questioned how much government and secret services already knew on the US and UK’s mass surveillance. Merkel has demanded rapid EU action on new data protection laws – and called on President Obama to respect the privacy rights of German citizens.
But even in the face of such massive international surveillance, EU member states are not likely to rupture relationships with their key ally the US. And sure enough, ambitious transatlantic trade talks started on schedule in July – with a sweetener from the US offering EU-US working groups to discuss the secret surveillance. How much ordinary citizens will learn about such transatlantic talks between spooks remains to be seen.
The EU, the US, and a range of other nations will all turn up at the Seoul Summit on cybersecurity in October 2013 to share worries about how to defend both digital freedom and security in the face of intrusive digital attacks and snooping from hostile states. Ironies abound here: how can the US or UK continue to argue for digital freedom at global internet summits while undertaking a massive international collection of phone, email, internet and other communications data? How can they continue with their attempts to persuade states like Brazil or South Africa to join them in standing up to Russia’s and China’s attempts to agree top-down international control of the net? And how can they worry about cybersecurity when they seem to have intruded on the electronic communications of most countries around the world?
The same questions will be asked at the next summit rendezvous in Bali, where the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will take place at the end of October. The IGF is seen as the quintessential summit for an open and free internet – the clumsily labelled “multi-stakeholder” approach to net governance. But the term multi-stakeholder means both that civil society and business, as well as governments, turn up, discuss and play a part in a networked way in ensuring the internet flourishes; and it means that the US dominance of key parts of that system continues. In the wake of the mass surveillance revelations, it will be no surprise if India or Brazil, as well as China and Russia, start to question this even more strongly.
In some ways the EU is doing its best. EU leaders are due to agree freedom of expression guidelines – online and off – before the end of the year, and this will be a crucial part of its future dialogues with other countries on human rights. The EU’s October summit will look at digital competitiveness – and perhaps privacy too. And the European Parliament has set up a welcome and vital committee of inquiry into the Snowden revelations.
But in this rush of summits and debates, more information is still to emerge. The UK and France have big surveillance programmes too and Sweden has laws that, like the US, permit snooping on “foreign” communications to a greater extent than on domestic ones – there are suggestions that so do other EU states such as Germany and the Netherlands.
True, none of these EU states are rushing towards China’s approach to internet censorship – with firewalls, blocks, censorship and harassment. They are still democracies.
But the EU should sort out a tough and common approach that stops mass surveillance and protects privacy and free speech online. If not, it will find that its leverage in the international debate on digital freedom and its influence on countries like India, Brazil, Kenya and many more has disappeared.