11/03/2014 Culture, Science, Education and Media
Online surveillance, profiling or storage of user data must be carried out in line with the standards of the European Convention on Human Rights, PACE’s Culture Committee has said. “Everyone’s private life, correspondence and personal data must be protected online,” the committee said, approving a report by Axel Fischer (Germany, EPP/CD) today in Paris.
The parliamentarians said interception of data by national security services, data-mining of social networks, the commercial profiling of users and large-scale hacking had all “deeply undermined the trust of users in cyber services”.
In the report, they called for:
- Online service providers to automatically apply encryption and conditional access technologies
- Law-abiding internet users to have the right to remain anonymous, while law-infringing users should be identifiable
- Providers of “cloud computing” services should automatically apply special protection to data they hold, and keep their “data cloud” always within the jurisdiction applicable to them
- Service providers should establish a common code of conduct
Existing instruments, such as the Council of Europe’s cybercrime convention, the convention on mutual assistance in criminal matters as well as the conventions on the legal protection of services on the one hand, and for the protection of individuals with regard to automatic processing of personal data, on the other, should be completed or up-dated to take into account the lack of security in cyberspace.
Mr Fischer’s report is due to be debated by the Assembly on 9 April in Strasbourg.
The adoption of Mr Fischer’s report in Paris was followed by a presentation by Duncan Campbell, a British investigative journalist based in Brighton, on state interference with privacy on the Internet, and more particularly about the “Five Eyes Alliance”. “The boundaries of intrusion have gone further and deeper than anyone could have imagined,” Mr Campbell stressed, presenting a roadmap of the scale of global interception. He warned that mass surveillance did not serve its essential objective as it was unable to actually defeat terrorism and made a strong plea for data encryption. The committee decided to monitor these questions closely.