Tag: US

Last Thursday, the U.N. Human Rights Committee released a report criticizing NSA surveillance, for among things, failing to protect rights of non-U.S. persons. The Committee’s report comes in the context of its overall review of civil and political rights in the U.S. in accordance with its treaty obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Late Monday night, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian each reported on what will inevitably be new competing efforts to reform the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata surveillance program.

The U.S. government has developed and deployed a surveillance system that records every single telephone call made in an unnamed country outside the U.S. for up to 30 days.

Access has supported greater international oversight of internet resources. We welcome today’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Commerce intends to transition its current coordinating role over the internet’s domain name system — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA — to the ‘global multistakeholder community.’

This week the United States will stand before an expert body at the United Nations and be forced to face difficult questions regarding its human rights record, including its performance on the right to privacy. Among the list of issues prepared by the Human Rights Committee for the review and shadow reports by human rights organizations is mass government surveillance and the U.S.’s refusal to recognize the extraterritorial application of human rights obligations.

Rule of law, legitimate purpose, non-arbitrariness, competent authority, oversight, transparency, and democratic accountability become US policy

Nearly a month after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C. Circuit) struck down the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) authority to enforce existing network neutrality rules, the FCC announced its response. In a statement today, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler engaged in impressive verbal acrobatics to avoid the simple truth: In order to protect the open and innovative internet the FCC must correct its earlier mistakes and expand the agency’s regulatory authority over internet service providers (ISP) under Title II of the 1996 Communications Act.

In 2013, the world learned that the NSA’s reach into our privacy extends further and deeper than we ever could have imagined.

Watch the U.S. State of the Union tonight and play along with the Access team: We’re bringing you SOTU 2014 Mass Surveillance Bingo.