Latin America: Surveillance and Human Rights in the Digital Age

               Violation of privacy is a very serious human rights violation. We can not tolerate this abuse. Record any evidence of privacy violation and help to do justice.  This post is a summary of two articles. The first with the title above was published at  https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2015/04/09/latin-america-surveillance-and-human-rights-in-the-digital-age/. The second was published at https://botpopuli.net/south-americas-and-the-surveillance-society

                In July 2014, the Uruguayan government secretly purchased the license for a piece of software to monitor citizen communications, "The Guardian" (as the Brazilian tool is known) is now being fully deployed with no clear guidelines. Civil society organisations fiercely opposed this development and are now starting a legal procedure to access information about the purchase.  This is just one of many examples of surveillance technology being used in Latin America: Latin America democracies might be becoming increasingly established, but the intelligence and security agencies have not adjusted to a new democratic era. Regulation of these agencies is still problematic and poorly discussed. Furthermore, governments are discussing cyber-security issues in international forums with little consideration of human rights issues. The secrecy and lack of regulation around surveillance technology poses a key question: how should we address the protection of human rights in an age of technological disruption in Latin America? When it comes to surveillance, Latin America governments have different capacities and not all fully respect the rule of law. Yet a clear trends are emerging: there is a small group of civil society advocates aware of these issues, technology used for surveillance is increasing and there is a new global scenario in place. Civil society groups have documented worrying practices by governments in the region. In Colombia, security forces spied on activists, journalists and members of the parliament using traditional and new technologies. In Argentina, a new bio-metric system has created the potential to gather key data about the Argentinean population that can be accessed by security forces without clear restraints. In Mexico, a new telecommunication law allows access to personal data (including mobile phone geo-location data in real time) to security agencies without a warrant. In Brazil, "Guardian" is being used to monitor protests. In Paraguay, civil society advocates successfully opposed a new telecommunication law that would allow government to store significant data on users. The list keeps getting longer. Surveillance tech also include drones, CCTV, facial recognition software, body scanners, and identification registry systems. Despite these practices, several Latin Americam governments, led by Brazil, promoted a joint declaration about the right to privacy in the digital age. In doing so, the regoin is not "walking the talk" that it promotes in global forums. A human rights framework needs to be developed and shared among stakeholders to answer crucial questions about the governance of surveillance technologies in Latin American democracies. In a post-Snowden world, the surveillance debate is linked with other Internet-associated issues such as net neutrality, copyright reform, and freedom of expression. There are at least three areas where Latin America needs a new and improved approach, advocating human rights-based policies: a) Governance of surveillance technologies:  In particular, transparency about technology purchases, operations protocols, reach and usage should be clearly established. Judiciary and human rights groups should ensure adequate oversight. This demands capacity building in civil society and accountable institutions, public leaders and security forces. b) Re-assessing normative frameworks for freedom of association, communication and speech in the digital age: Laws such as Marco Civil in Brazil offer an example of how national telecommunication infrastructures can play a role in securing certain guarantees in the digital age. All regulation should target criminal activity without targeting lawful exercise of freedom of speech online. c) Strengthening privacy and data protection. Not all Latin American countries have strong data protection and privacy law. In light of recent developments in terms of the role the private sector is playing in surveillance and other areas such as health-care, new regulation is needed. Citizens should know who has data about them, who is using it, and for what purpose.Timing is crucial here. If no action is taken, Latin American countries might well engage in building their surveillance apparatus unchecked. On the other hand, if appropriate action is taken, Latin America might well develop a progressive path. The path ahead can still be shaped to guarantee human rights in the digital age.

                    We live in times when algorithms facilitate electoral fraud, track people's moviment and can analyze micro-expressions to anticipate criminal behavior. This article examines the introdution of transnational technologies in the South American context, and how they are raising human rights and privacy concerns. In 2019, the Argentine computing specialist, Ariel Garbarz, shared with the puplic prosecutor's office of Argentine his concern about the possibility of electoral fraud in the upcoming Argentinian elections. Garbarz also denounced the infalibility of Election-360, an election management software, acquired from the transnational company Smartmatic. Election-360 has been in the news for fraud in several countries. Built on proprietary software with codes that are closed, it is not amenable to audit by computer inspectors assigned to monitor elections. There are many doubts generated by Smartmatic's eletronic voting system regarding the violation of secrecy and possible rigging of results. Surveillance cameras are increasingly in use by security forces in various countries, including South America. But the images captured from these surveillance cameras are analyzed by tech companies working on A.I. applications. While official narratives assert that the use of these applications is restricted to crime detection, it is not a transparent process, and can easily impinge on citizens rights. Both Chile and Argentina are advancing the implementation of A.I. facial recognition systems, supposedly to detect people who are on wanted lists. But this technology has the potential to jeopardize the privacy of millions of innocent citizens. Previously, Argentina had also announced the purchase of aerostatic surveillance ballons with cameras capable of recording a 360 degrees view, equipped with day and night vision, to identify and track targets for kilometers. As with Election 360, these surveillance processes are not open to public scrutiny. As governments increasingly adopt such surveillance tools, many questions arise. How are the images recorded in public or private spaces treated? Who utilizes these images? what are the custody and guardianship processes in place, and for how long is the data stored? The truth is that no protocol has been studied, and no debate about the protection of personal data has explicity addressed issues around the lack of transparency and accountability that accompany these processes. The analysis of images from CCTV cameras is only one of the many A.I. applications at play in the name of public safety. The US Department of Justice has funded a program at Cardiff University to develop a software for the analysis of social networks to detect where incidents of crime may occur. Fake news has spread rapidly through the internet, and particularly through social networks. To curb the spread of misinformation, large tech corporations such as Google anf Facebook, are seeking to impose their own standards of censorship. By using its algorithms to conceal certain media outlets, or censor, or certain photograps and videos, Google is able to manipulate its search engine results, essentially appropriating the internet and its information avenues. The lack of transparency, regulatory mechanisms and citizen and state oversight, makes it impossible for the public to assess the success of these methods, and hold these companies accountable. The data collected, supposedly in the service of security and the detection of crimes lead to the definitive loss of an individual privacy, as well as a threat to democratic processes.

270th Birthday of Goethe

             A little more than two months ago, precisely on 28th August, the German writer Goethe would complete 270 years-old, so this post is a tribute to him. His writings advanced the world towards the right direction of science, culture, education, and ethics. He was against hipocrisy, war, unaccountability and solipsism.This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at       https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe.  The second was published at  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/01/design-for-living-books-adam-kirsch

              Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His Faust though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited, is also Europe's greatest long poem since John Milton's Paradise Lost. Goethe was the eldest of seven children, though only one other survived into adulthood, his sister Cornelia. The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years to Goethe, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to the duke partly explains Goethe's hostility from the start to the French Revolution. Goethe's distance from the Revolution can be overstated. He disliked the militarism and centralism of modern, would-be states like Prussia or, later, Napoleon's France. He felt at home in Germany's multiplicity of states small enough for rulers and ruled to have a sense of personal obligation to each other. The year 1829 brought celebration throughout Germany of Goethe's 80th birthday. It also brought the first performance in Weimar of part one of Faust. In 1830, came the unexpected news that his son had died in Rome. Goethe fell seriously ill immediately but recovery. He still had work to do, and only in August 1831, he sealed the manuscript of part two of Faust.                                                                                                                                                                                                            To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the last inch, a Shakespeare squared or cubed. Goethe's significance is only roughly indicated by the sheer scope of his collected works, which run to a hundred and forty-three volumes. Here is a writer who produced not only some of his language's greatest plays but hundreds of major poems of all kinds. Now consider that he also wrote three of the most influential novels in European literature, and a series of classic memoirs documenting his childhood and his travels, and essays on scientific subjects ranging from the theory of colors to the morphology of plants. Then, there are several volumes of his recorded table talk, more than twenty thousand extant letters, and the reminiscences of the many visitors who met him throughout his sixty-year career as one of Europe's most famous men. Goethe accomplished all this while simultameously working as a senior civil servant in the duchy of Weimar, where he was responsible for everything from mining operations to casting actors in the court theatre. Germans began debating the significance of the Goethe phenomenon while he was still in his twenties, and they have never stopped. His lifetime, spanning some of the most monumental disruptions in modern history, is referred to as a single whole, the Goethezeit, or Age of Goethe. Worshipped as the greatest genius in German history and as an examplary poet and human being, he has also been criticized for his political conservatism and quietism, Goethe is strangely neglected in the English-speaking world. Goethe's poems, unfortunately, seldom come across vividly in translation. This is partly because Goethe so often cloaks his sophistication in deceptively simple language. One of his earliest great poems, is written in the style of a folk song and almost entirely in words of one or two syllables. Victorian intellectuals revered Goethe as the venerable Sage of Weimar. Thomas Carlyle implored the reading public to "close thy Byron, open thy Goethe." Matthew Arnold saw Goethe as a kind of healer and liberator, calling him the "physician of the Iron Age," who read each wound, each weakness of the suffering human race." For these writers, Goethe seemed to possess something the modern world lacked: wisdom, the ability to understand life and how it should be lived. Though he  studied law, at his father's insistence, and even practiced briefly, the occupation was never more than a cover for what really interested him, which was writing and falling in love. It was one of these early infatuations that plunged Goethe into the despair that would become the subject of his first success, "The Sorrow of Young Werther."  This short novel tells the story of an unhappy love affair. Through letters written by Werther toa friend, we learn about his hopeless love. After Charlotte get married, Werther feels that he has nothing to live for, and decides to commit suicide. At least some of Goethe's readers took him to be endorsing and glamorizing Werther's suicide. One young woman, named Chirstel von Lassberg, drowned herself in the river Ilm with a copy of the novel in her pocket. Goethe must have felt much as one might imagine J.D.Salinger felt about Mark Chapman's copy of "The Catcher in the Rye," guilty, but also horrified at being so misread. Yet, far from ennobling its hero, "Werther" is actually a warning against what Goethe sees as a consuming spiritual disease. What kills Werther is not disappointed love but toxic self-centeredness, subjectivity run wild. The fatal complication of his illness is pride. So far, Werther strongly resembles Hamlet, who calls Denmark and the whole world a prison. After ten years of office work, Goethe abruptly threw aside his work and left Weimar. Goethe's time in Italy marked a watershed in his life. He was thirty-seven. As a worshipper of the classical world, Goethe found Rome to be a revelation and a rebirth. Liberated from his more onerous court duties, Goethe was free to take up projects that he had first begun to think about years, even decades, earlier: the gestation period for the verse drama "Faust"  spanned more than thirty years. Goethe's persistence also testifies to the continuity of his interests during his entire life. The meaning of education, the difficulty of embracing life, the danger and redemptive possibilities of love. The concept of 'Bildung', a word that means education but also implies a cultivation of the self and of maturity, was central to Goethe's thought, and he, in turn, made it central to German culture. For Thomas Mann, Goethe was above all an educator, Mann wrote that a "vocation towards educating others does not spring from inner harmony, but rather from inner uncertainties, disharmony, difficulty, and from the difficulty of knowing one's own self." Goethe's most celebrated and canonical work, "Faust"  is defined by his refusal to be satisfied with anything life has to offer. As in the traditional folktale, Goethe's Faust sells his soul to the Devil. This is central issue of Goethe's life and work: on what terms is life worth living? For Faust, as forWerther before him, ordinary existence is flavorless and intolerable; like an alcoholic, he demands ever-stronger draughts of emotional intoxication. Above all, he demands the intoxication of love, and he finds it with Gretchen, an innocent young girl, whom he seduces and abandons. Not until the end of the play, when Faust returns to find Gretchen in prison for infanticide, and on the edge of madness, he realizes how selfish his quest for experiences have been. A heavenly voice announces that Gretchen will be saved, Goethe, no moralist when it comes to sex, can forgive her for being carried away by passion. But there is no salvation for Faust, whose crime is the one transgression that Goethe can never forgive, solipsism, the refusal to acknowledge the full reality of other people.