Privacy security

How Countries “Outsource” Electronic Surveillance And Threaten Privacy

One might assume that countries like the United States and United Kingdom simply collect data on citizens through their own mass surveillance systems. Many governments around the world, however, work in concert to maintain intelligence sharing partnerships that allow them to pool their mined electronic communications. In a new report titled “Secret Global Surveillance Networks: Intelligence Sharing Between Governments and the Need for Safeguards,” Privacy International describes these partnerships as the outsourcing of surveillance. In “allowing governments to bypass domestic constraints on their surveillance activities,” the watchdog group says that the partnerships can “contribute to, or facilitate, serious human rights abuses, such as unlawful arrest or detention, or torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

Depending on the countries’ specific intelligence sharing arrangements, most anything can be shared, says Edin Omanovic, Privacy International’s State Surveillance Programme Lead. The system’s trove includes information like raw internet and phone data, intelligence reports about individuals, watchlists, information about intelligence gathering techniques, information about encryption and decryption techniques, and more.