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Declaration of Civil Society Organizations on the Role of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners
Montreal, September 25, 2007
We the undersigned representatives of civil society groups, having
gathered together in Montreal in advance of the September 2007 International
Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, have come
to agreement on several important points that we would like to bring
before the world’s privacy commissioners. We agree that:
- We are all witnessing the abandonment of our societies’ core
values and rights of privacy and autonomy at an alarming rate.
- We are witnessing the creation of an unprecedented infrastructure
for the global surveillance of individuals and groups. That includes
the development of previously unimaginable systems to watch over
our movement: the tracking of travelers, the profiling of passengers
through vast data collection programs, including “passenger
name record” databases, “advanced passenger information
systems” and “entry-exit” schemes, and the imposition
of new identity-tracking systems. We are witnessing the growing
use of technology – including RFID (Radio Frequency
Identification) tags, biometrics, DNA, data mining, CCTV (Closed
Circuit Television), and many others – to track our movement
within countries, communities, and even schools. We continue to
uncover new ways in which our communications are becoming susceptible
to eavesdropping. All these systems, and others, are driving an
explosion of databases of personal information, along with new
means of rapidly searching, combining, and judging the contents
of those databases.
- These systems for surveillance are being constructed both by
governments and the private sector. Alarmingly, there is a growing
convergence between the surveillance activities of states and of
private corporations.
- These systems are often developed without democratic debate,
authorisation, or oversight. As a result, the claimed benefits
of such systems are too often taken at face value, and they do
not receive the scrutiny necessary to ensure that they interfere
with our private lives only in ways that are necessary and proportionate.
- Our nations’ legal systems have largely failed to keep
pace with the explosion of invasive new technologies. Elected representatives
often lack adequate information about these developments, even
when their consent is actually sought. In some of our countries,
judicial institutions defer too often to the claims of executive
authority, while in others they rarely hear cases on these issues
because civil society groups lack the resources to bring challenges.
- We are witnessing a destruction of individual rights that is
greater than the sum all of these developments – an increasingly
all-encompassing surveillance society.
- Although our nations have all faced far greater threats and crises
than terrorism within living memory, our security establishments
have aggressively used the threat of terrorism and international
crime to increase their own powers and undermine existing legal
protections for privacy – and they are increasingly working
together across national boundaries to advance their mutual aims.
- The world’s privacy commissioners are uniquely positioned
to defend our societies’ core values and rights of privacy
in the face of this onslaught.
THEREFORE, we believe that stronger, more aggressive
action by privacy commissioners is required to tackle this problem – that
specific reports, warnings and enforcement actions, while often valuable,
are not sufficient to address the enormity of the problem we face.
In particular:
- The world’s privacy commissioners need to significantly
broaden their mission to incorporate a greater focus on the “big
picture” of disappearing privacy, and a stronger engagement
in the overall direction in which our countries are headed. Too
many privacy commissions have become mere administrative agencies,
or have been cowed by the security agencies’ aggressive use
of the terrorism threat to justify rollbacks in our privacy.
- We believe that the problem is urgent – that the pace of
technology and the exploitation of the surveillance potentials
it creates by the government and private sector mean that we must
act quickly, before we are faced with the fait accompli of
a total surveillance society.
- The world’s privacy commissioners must increase their own
collective efforts at protecting privacy to counterbalance the
increasing cross-border efforts of the world’s security establishments.
- There must be a more forceful effort by privacy commissioners
in prodding their governments to resist pressure to weaken existing
privacy standards, whether from the United States, other nations,
or regional bodies. Within the global community, a single nation’s
bad practice can degrade the privacy protections of all.
- In particular, this effort should include more active engagement
with the public and the media, and if necessary the courts. Privacy
commissioners should demand that governmental actions affecting
privacy be publicly debated and democratically decided. And privacy
commissioners should actively fight for the creation of adequate
oversight mechanisms to permanently protect the public against
invasive programs.
- Privacy Commissioners should be more proactive in addressing
the privacy impacts of commercial services before such services
become too entrenched for action to be practical. And they should
coordinate their efforts in what is an increasingly global marketplace.
- There must be a concerted, cross-national effort to preserve
fundamental human rights, and protect individuals from being routinely
tracked in their movements and daily interactions, which are essential
freedoms in a democratic nation.
- To our governments, we also call for actions to strengthen the
institutions of privacy and data protection by giving privacy and
data protection commissioners greater authority and independence,
and creating such institutions where they do not exist.
Signatories:
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