Stop Scanning Me
Notably, the UN report linked is a report TO the Human Rights Council f a subordinate office, and not the official recommendation of the council itself, or any equivalent or superior UN organ.<p>The actual recommendations of the OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right), who wrote the report, are as follows:<p>&quot;
56. With this in mind, OHCHR recommends that States:<p>(a) Ensure that any interference with the right to privacy, including hacking, restrictions to access and use of encryption technology and surveillance of the public, complies with international human rights law, including the principles of legality, legitimate aim, necessity and proportionality and non-discrimination, and does not impair the essence of that right;<p>(b) Conduct human rights due diligence systematically, including regular comprehensive human rights impact assessments, when designing, developing, purchasing, deploying and operating surveillance systems;<p>(c) Take into account, when conducting human rights due diligence and assessing the necessity and proportionality of new surveillance systems and powers, the entire legal and technological environment in which those systems or powers are or would be embedded; States should also consider risks of abuse, function creep and repurposing, including risks as a result of future political changes;<p>(d) Adopt and effectively enforce, through independent, impartial and well- resourced authorities, data privacy legislation for the public and private sectors that complies with international human rights law, including safeguards, oversight and remedies to effectively protect the right to privacy;<p>(e) Take immediate measures to effectively increase the transparency of the use of surveillance technologies, including by appropriately informing the public and affected individuals and communities and regularly providing data relevant for the public to assess their efficacy and impact on human rights;<p>(f) Promote public debate of the use of surveillance technologies and ensure meaningful participation of all stakeholders in decisions on the acquisition, transfer, sale, development, deployment and use of surveillance technologies, including the elaboration of public policies and their implementation;<p>(g) Implement moratoriums on the domestic and transnational sale and use of surveillance systems, such as hacking tools and biometric systems that can be used for the identification or classification of individuals in public places, until adequate safeguards to protect human rights are in place; such safeguards should include domestic and export control measures, in line with the recommendations made herein and in previous reports to the Human Rights Council<p>(h) Ensure that victims of human rights violations and abuses linked to the use of surveillance systems have access to effective remedies.<p>57. In relation to the specific issues raised in the present report, OHCHR recommends that States:<p>Hacking<p>(a) Ensure that the hacking of personal devices is employed by authorities only as a last resort, used only to prevent or investigate a specific act amounting to a serious threat to national security or a specific serious crime, and narrowly targeted at the person suspected of committing those acts; such measures should be subject to strict independent oversight and should require prior approval by a judicial body;<p>Encryption<p>(b) Promote and protect strong encryption and avoid all direct, or indirect, general and indiscriminate restrictions on the use of encryption, such as prohibitions, criminalization, the imposition of weak encryption standards or requirements for mandatory general client-side scanning; interference with the encryption of private communications of individuals should only be carried out when authorized by an independent judiciary body and on a case-by-case basis, targeting individuals if strictly necessary for the investigation of serious crimes or the prevention of serious crimes or serious threats to public safety or national security;<p>Surveillance of public spaces and export control of surveillance technology<p>(c) Adopt adequate legal frameworks to govern the collection, analysis and sharing of social media intelligence that clearly define permissible grounds, prerequisites, authorization procedures and adequate oversight mechanisms;<p>(d) Avoid general privacy-intrusive monitoring of public spaces and ensure that all public surveillance measures are strictly necessary and proportionate for achieving important legitimate objectives, including by strictly limiting their location and time, as well as the duration of data storage, the purpose of data use and access to data; biometric recognition systems should only be used in public spaces to prevent or investigate serious crimes or serious public safety threats and if all requirements under international human rights law are implemented with regard to public spaces;<p>(e) Establish robust well-tailored export control regimes applicable to surveillance technologies, the use of which carries high risks for the enjoyment of human rights; States should require transparent human rights impact assessments that take into account the capacities of the technologies at issue as well as the situation in the recipient State, including compliance with human rights, adherence to the rule of law, the existence and effective enforcement of applicable laws regulating surveillance activities and the existence of independent oversight mechanisms;<p>(f) Ensure that, in the provision and use of surveillance technologies, public- private partnerships uphold and expressly incorporate human rights standards and do not result in an abdication of governmental accountability for human rights.&quot;<p>However, many of the recommendations only make sense for countries that recognize the supremacy of international law over domestic law.