At the end of the climate summit, Sultan Al Jaber celebrates the agreement reached in extremis and praises those attending the meeting in the United Arab Emirates (USA): “Future generations may not know their names, but they will owe a debt of gratitude to each one of you.”
The ones who most certainly do know the names of all the attendees are their police services, who will have recorded from the start of the summit where and with whom they were and what they wrote or communicated, not only on their social networks, but in their private communications. .
Will all of this have influenced the outcome of the summit in any way? Have the positions that seek to extend (despite the suicide it imposes) the current energy model have had an advantage?
Upon entering the country, a “smart door” for voluntary use subjected the traveler to a biometric control that allowed them to be physically monitored throughout their stay.
Not going through it did not make you invisible: “Whether or not you benefit from this program, a wide network of surveillance cameras spread throughout Dubai is capable of identifying all visitors based on the data collected at customs,” the organization denounced. Human Rights Watch (HRW) at the start of the meeting.
“From the moment COP28 participants land in Dubai, they will be exposed to intrusive government surveillance,” he added in a statement. HRW’s senior surveillance researcher, Zach Campbell, told Efe that “it seems unlikely that negotiations aimed at achieving the ambitious outcome that the world urgently needs to confront climate change will succeed if delegates cannot communicate without fear.” . These Arab dictatorships…
Across the pond (to the east) there is a similar debate.
About twenty organizations and internet service companies have just asked the government of their country for an immediate reform of the so-called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It is a law that, in short, allows any communication with a foreign citizen to be intervened without a court order. Yes, without a court order.
It began to take shape after the 9/11 attacks and must be renewed before the end of the year. Hence, it is time to debate or try to introduce mechanisms for greater control.
Defenders of the law promise that relaxing it would leave the country at the feet of all kinds of crime, and that is why they have exhibited numerous successes since it was applied: they discovered the Chinese origin of a chemical component used to synthesize fentanyl, they discovered atrocities committed by the Russians in Ukraine, they identified multiple ransomware attacks against some of their critical infrastructure or cyberattacks against some of their large companies, among many others.
The platform that brings together the opponents warns that “as providers of digital products and services, both for-profit and non-profit, we depend on the trust of our customers to maintain digital communities. If widely documented abuses are not addressed in legislation, people will remain concerned about the possibility of their most intimate information being collected by intelligence agencies without accountability, thus deteriorating the economic and social power of the Internet.”
That country on the other side of the pond is not Nicaragua or Bolivia or the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. We are talking about that paradigm of freedoms that the United States is or claims to be.
The regulations can be purchased on Amazon. Softcover, 102 pages. 16.95 euros.
The content can also be shot. Copy it, I mean.
