Every four years, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) evaluates all of a country's human-rights commitments during a process called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). During the UPR, the UN HRC examines the promises a country has made - i.e., in human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and evaluates to what extent that country is living up to its obligations.
In anticipation of next year's UPR of the United States, CDT and the ACLU sought to do something unique: after wading into the sea of NSA-related surveillance revelations that have emerged during this past year, we highlighted (and used our technical expertise to explain) five specific surveillance programs that have a particularly outrageous and broad impact on the human rights - including privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly - of people around the world. We aimed to provide an accessible technical description of the five programs and explain the impact these programs have on millions of people throughout the world, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing and without any judicial oversight. The five programs we analyzed include:
- DISHFIRE, an initiative through which the US collects hundreds of millions of private text messages worldwide every day;
- CO-TRAVELER, through which the US captures billions of location updates daily from mobile phones around the world;
- MUSCULAR, which entails the US' interception of all data transmitted between certain data centers operated by Yahoo! and Google outside of US territory;
- MYSTIC, a US program that collects all telephone call details in five sovereign countries other than the US, as well as the full content of all phone calls in two of those countries; and
- QUANTUM, a US program that listens in real-time to traffic on the Internet's most fundamental infrastructure and can respond based on certain triggering information with active attacks, including the delivery of malicious software to the end-user's device.
At the end of our submission, we make a number of recommendations to the US about how it can improve its respect for human rights in this context. The recommendations focus on halting the US' indiscriminate interception of individuals' private communications data, getting greater (or, to be more accurate, any) Congressional and judicial oversight for these programs, stopping the attacks under QUANTUM, and ensuring that the relevant orders and regulations are brought into line with human-rights law.
Comment: This article offers a whole new meaning to the phrase: "From your lips to God's ear."