public campaign around a proposed international treaty on the right to privacy and protection from michael's blog

On Thursday, the global advocacy group Avaaz, with Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda and Laura Poitras, is launching a public campaign around a proposed international treaty on the right to privacy and protection for whistleblowers. The proposed treaty is referred to simply as the Snowden Treaty after Edward Snowden.

The organizers say that experts in international law developed the proposed treaty, along with legal experts on Internet freedoms and surveillance at the Electronic Frontiers Federation.

The event is timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Snowden, who will be giving the welcoming remarks at the event on Thursday via a video link from Moscow, is joined by supporters and friendly forces that aided him with releasing information on secret surveillance and video analytics tactics the federal government used. You can see some of those supporters and event partners on the Snowden Treaty website.

A media invite for the press to attend the event explained that other support for this or similar efforts also exists:

"Both the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council have passed resolutions expressing 'deep concern' about the impact of mass surveillance and collection of personal data on the exercise of our human rights, and the UN's own new special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, in recent remarks to the press, has also called for a 'Geneva Convention for the Internet' to protect privacy rights."

That same media invite explained the Snowden Treaty effort this way:

"The treaty would greatly strengthen protections for whistleblowers above those already existing in international law and commit signatories to take meaningful action to address violations of the right to privacy, access to information or to free and secure communications revealed by a whistleblower. The global fight for privacy rights is as prescient now as it was over two years ago when the Snowden leaks first broke. The UK is rolling out a new 'snoopers charter,' the NSA is fighting back in the courts to protect its rights to spy on citizens and Colombia was just caught using US technology to collect massive amounts of personal data on innocent citizens."

While the Snowden leaks made "big data" a household word and created much controversy and debate over where the line should be drawn between individual rights to privacy and a government's duty to protect its citizens, few legal protections for individual privacy in this digital age have been realized.

No one knows what will ultimately happen to Snowden for making the disclosures. And no one yet knows what, if anything, will come of the cries for individual privacy protection.

Consumers appear enthralled with apps that siphon their personal data at record speeds, corporations see too much money in it to give up efforts in collecting even more personal data, and governments see too many threats on the horizon to seriously entertain letting go of information sources. All told, there appears to be little impetus behind the privacy movement. That does not necessarily mean the struggle is over though.