Pierluigi Paganini November 27, 2011

The control of information is the main concern of Governments. More or less declared the major players of a precarious global economy have implemented digital surveillance systems, from India to China, passing Russia and USA.

The crucial point is the legality of these actions conducted  by Intelligence Agencies in the name of Nations Security abusing the rights of citizens.  To this we must consider another  significant issue , the corruption.  Corruption has no Country and is a cross problem widely diffused.

The dilemma is always the same … “who controls the controller?” Obvious who manage massive e-surveillance systems has a vantage point to gather confidential information and therefore make for a powerful private interests.

Even more dangerous is the phenomenon of corruption, enslaved to the power that can give rise to  intestine current  whose sole purpose is to destabilize the current political Government. Approaching the problem more in detail, we have on the one hand impeccable initiatives undertaken for reasons of National Security , on the other hand there is a pervasive phenomenon of  the human weakness to the money.  During this days in Italy for example we are fighting with a corruption case that involve the Finmeccanica Firm, one of the top euro defense provider.

Lets give a look to corruption perception report and related map.

It’s clear that all those States that are investing in e-Surveillance systems are the same governments that suffers majors corruptions problems. I believe that the combination of this two factors is dangerous at least like the phenomenon you want to fight, the cyber threat. Here you are some sample of monitoring system deployed in Country with high level of corruption:

• China implements Great Firewall with the Golden Shield Project
• Russia has launched a public tenter to implement a monitoring system
• India has implemented its own central monitoring systems

Corruption is a phenomenon that exposes the internal organizations and governments to threats that are really difficult to detect.

…. All this projects are intended to strengthen the e-surveillance capabilities of the government without any constitutional safeguards.

Indian Government for example has forced  telecom and internet service providers (ISPs) to install monitoring equipment for surveillance of internet traffic.

Recently, the United Nations declared “Right to Access” to Internet as Human Right. This would have a positive impact upon many Human Rights in Cyberspace. For instance, Right to Speech and Expression, Right to Privacy, Right to Know, etc cannot be violated by any CMS Project. United Nations must expand Human Rights Protection to many more issues considering anyone of this violations.

It has no sense to promote human freedom closing the eyes on corruptions events, on the direct correlation that there is between corruption and policy to implement detailed traffic filtering.

Let me conclude with the hope that all the Governments that have introduced monitoring  systems are confident about their actual usage and that they will fight corruption in the same way they have declared war to any cyber threat.

Pierluigi Paganini

Other References

http://hrpic.blogspot.com/2011/11/e-surveillance-in-india.html

http://hrpic.blogspot.com/2010/10/protecting-civil-liberties-in-indian.html

http://perry4law.com/hr/uid.html

http://therussiamonitor.com/2009/04/09/medvedevs-anti-corruption-measures-whitewash-or-real-deal-2/