CC BY 2.0 Sascha Pohflepp / Flickr. Some rights reserved.“We don't want to ban encryption, but our inability to see what terrorists are plotting undermines our security.” These words don’t belong to a member of the Russian parliament or Vladimir Putin’s adviser on the internet, but the UK Home Secretary. It’s clear that Amber Rudd’s recent statement concerns not only digital encryption, but the whole system of state surveillance — interception, listening, video surveillance and various systems for identifying individuals, including biometrics. For some reason, law enforcement agencies around the world believe that if you take everyone’s fingerprints, force them to register their DNA, gain access to their correspondence and make them report to the police when they visit their family in the next town over, crime will disappear.
The idea that “an honest person has nothing to hide” is often repeated by those for whom the concept of privacy only impedes their ability to track their fellow citizens. But you also hear it from people who clearly do have something to hide, despite the fact that they are not doing anything to violate the law. In 2016, the Agora International Human Rights Group produced its first report, revealing several hundred identified cases of politically motivated surveillance of Russian activists, journalists and NGOs — when police officers photographed and fingerprinted people detained during protests, for example. Human rights defenders moving around the country regularly encounter increased attention from law enforcement agencies — they are detained, searched and questioned about why they’re travelling. State and pro-state media broadcast the results of wiretaps and video surveillance of opposition politicians, which have been clearly passed to them by the security services, as well as compromising stories they have fabricated themselves. Internet services periodically warn their users that “state-sponsored hackers” are trying to get access to their accounts.
Human rights defenders moving around the country regularly encounter increased attention from law enforcement agencies — they are detained, searched and questioned about why they’re travelling
