Finally we’re promised real action over NSA surveillance — but not for the best reasons

[Commentary] Germany and Brazil are pushing forward with proposals for a global right to online privacy. It would have been nice if this action had begun in earnest when it was citizens being spied upon, and not only after Germany’s Angela Merkel and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff were revealed as targets.

Merkel’s tapping seems to have been the tipping point, probably because she’s the second most powerful person in the world. But the French spy on the Americans, too. What’s more – hang onto your seat here – lots of countries spy on each other, all over the world. True, you’re not supposed to do this to allies, but it’s been happening forever. This is what spies do. But getting caught will get you burned. So Merkel and Roussef had to take action, and that’s what is happening now: as Foreign Policy reported, they are joining forces to push the United Nations for a new global right to online privacy. The key proposal is to update the privacy bit of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to take online activities into account. This is a great idea, but it isn’t that simple. Not only will the existing wording of that section (Article 17) have to be finessed into something that can tackle the sort of deliberate yet untargeted data collection that we now face, but there’s an enforcement issue too. Forget the out-and-out authoritarian regimes out there — will the US change its own policies to abide by new supranational norms? That’s a pretty big question, particularly when there’s nothing to make it do so.