Snowden: Mass surveillance not justified by fight against terrorism

The “secret, massive and indiscriminate” surveillance conducted by intelligence services and disclosed by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism, the most senior human rights official in Europe has warned.

Stop trying to justify mass surveillance of Americans by using the tired old B.S. claim its for our safety in the fight against terrorism. It's a LIE!

In a direct challenge to the United Kingdom and other states, Nils Muižnieks, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, calls for greater transparency and stronger democratic oversight of the way security agencies monitor the internet. He also said that so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing treaty between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be published.

“Suspicionless mass retention of communications data is fundamentally contrary to the rule of law … and ineffective,” the Latvian official argues in a 120-page report, The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World. “Member states should not resort to it or impose compulsory retention of data by third parties.”

As human rights commissioner, Muižnieks has the power to intervene as a third party in cases sent to the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. His report is published the week after the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that the legal regime governing mass surveillance of the internet by the monitoring agency GCHQ is “human rights compliant”.

Muižnieks wrote: “In connection with the debate on the practices of intelligence and security services prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations, it is becoming increasingly clear that secret, massive and indiscriminate surveillance programmes are not in conformity with European human rights law and cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism or other important threats to national security. Such interferences can only be accepted if they are strictly necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim.”

The civil liberties organizations are planning to appeal against the ruling to the ECHR.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/08/mass-surveillance-exposed-edward-snowden-not-justified-by-fight-against-terrorism
https://wcd.coe.int/com.instranet.InstraServlet?command=com.instranet.CmdBlobGet&InstranetImage=2654047&SecMode=1&DocId=2216804&Usage=2

Judge Posner says NSA should be able to get everything & that privacy is overrated:

Judge Richard Posner at a recent conference on cybercrime, Posner unloaded with some of his more ridiculous beliefs, essentially saying that the NSA should be able to spy on whoever they want because "national security" is more important than privacy (or the 4th Amendment, apparently):

“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”

The old "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" trope. If that's true, then it does make you wonder what Posner himself is hiding. As Dave Maass pointed out, Judge Posner has redacted the name of his trust on his financial disclosure form.

Posner doubled down on this by claiming that if someone looked at his mobile phone, they'd just find pictures of his cat and nothing too important:

“If someone drained my cell phone, they would find a picture of my cat, some phone numbers, some email addresses, some email text,” he said. “What’s the big deal?

“Other people must have really exciting stuff,” Posner added. “Do they narrate their adulteries, or something like that?”

Posner claims as long as you make yourself extremely boring and unthreatening – don’t exercise your political liberties, but instead, just take pictures of your cat, arrange Little League games, and exchange recipes - then you have nothing to worry about from surveillance. In other words, as long as you remain an obedient servant of political and corporate power – then you have nothing to worry about from surveillance.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us, Judge Posner is a complete and total hypocrite on this issue -- in a 2011 case concerning whether or not citizens have a First Amendment right to film the police, Posner was suddenly worried about the police's right to privacy:

JUDGE POSNER: Once all this stuff can be recorded, there’s going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers.
ACLU attorney Richard O’Brien: Is that a bad thing, your honor?
JUDGE POSNER: Yes, it is a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.

Apparently it only applies to those in power.

The converse, of course, is equally true: if you do anything unorthodox or challenging to those in power – if you become a civil rights leader or an antiwar activist – then you're justifiably provoking surveillance aimed at you.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/14063329364/judge-posner-says-nsa-should-be-able-to-get-everything-that-privacy-is-overrated.shtml
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/08/bad-shameful-dirty-secrets-u-s-judge-richard-posner-hiding-demand-know/