In the wake of the Snowden disclosures,”The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age” – a resolution urging member states for protection and respect of privacy in the digital age – has been approved by the UN general assembly’s human rights committee, on Tuesday.

The draft saw sponsorship from Germany and Brazil owing to the news of snooping on the respective countries, even as the United States tried to persuade the “Five Eyes” nations of the UK, Australia and New Zealand to influence the resolution, as it believes that  its surveillance activities and practices are not illegal.

It has been reported however that “surveillance using metadata” has been removed from the text as being an intrusion of privacy – a move brought about to pacify the Five Eyes.

“Following the approval, some delegates stressed the need for agreed international human rights mechanisms in relation to ensuring privacy and freedom of expression,” said the statement announcing the move.

It further added, “Some expressed regret over the lack of a specific reference to such mechanisms in the draft, while others applauded the consensus as a clear international reaction to the national and extraterritorial electronic surveillance activities conducted by the United States.”

A193-member committee approved the resolution.

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American whistleblower in exile, Edward Snowden, has revealed the existence of a secret search engine, ICReach for sharing citizen metadata within various US domestic law enforcement agencies and more.

“The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones,” reports The Intercept in an article published on Monday.

However, metadata provides contextual information only, such as the time and date, phone numbers, etc. but not the content of the message sent or call made.

The leak discloses from a memo dating December 2007 –
“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community. This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

A successor to the PROTON and CRISSCROSS systems, through ICReach more than 1000 analysts in 23 different US law enforcement agencies have access to approximately 850 billion records. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed in a statement that ICReach shares data collected under Executive Order 12333, “a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive” that conducts surveillance with minimal court or congressional interference.

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After a four-month investigation by the Washington Post, it was revealed on Saturday that only 10 percent of data intercepted by the National Security Agency was linked to the intended targets. The rest of the 90 percent, consisted of both ordinary American and non-American Internet users who had their conversations intercepted and were “caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.”

The Washington Post reviewed approximately 160,000 intercepted e-mail’s and instant message’s, as well as 7,900 documents taken from over 11,000 online accounts. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders were recorded and catalogued, telling “stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.” Moreover, the Post reported that over 5,000 private photo’s were also collected.

The information gathered by the NSA, according to the report, provided a startling insight into the lives of ordinary American’s, but was crucially not of any intelligence value. On the other hand, the document showed that NSA’s surveillance efforts led to the capture of Umar Patek, “a suspect in the terrorist attack on the Indonesian island Bali in 2002; Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a bomb builder in Pakistan; and other examples the Post is withholding at the request of the CIA so as not to interfere with current intelligence operations.”

Robert Litt, the general counsel to the director of national intelligence, commented on the news in an interview on Sunday:

““These reports simply discuss the kind of incidental interception of communications that we have always said takes place under Section 702,” he said. “We target only valid foreign intelligence targets under that authority, and the most that you could conclude from these news reports is that each valid foreign intelligence target talks to an average of nine people.””

However, Snowden also pointed out that the documents he provided the Post offered a path to a concrete debate about the costs and benefits of Section 702 surveillance.

“Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders,” he added, “their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?”

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Vodafone, the second largest telecommunications company in the world, has revealed that government agencies have installed wires in their system that allow them to listen and track the calls of customers.

The Guardian reported in the early hours of the morning that the telecom company, which operates in 29 countries, had been connected with wires “connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer.”

In six countries that Vodafone operates in, the law either obliges telecom companies to install direct access wires or allows governments to do so. As such, these countries make it unlawful to disclose that their governments are accessing Vodafone’s system for surveillance purposes – therefore, the telecom company has not stated which countries have been wire tapping.

“I never thought the telcos [telecommunications companies] would be so complicit,” said Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International. “It’s a brave step by Vodafone and hopefully the other telcos will become more brave with disclosure, but what we need is for them to be braver about fighting back against the illegal requests and the laws themselves.”

Vodafone will release a Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday in an attempt to break the silence on government surveillance and fight against the widespread use of phone and broadband wire-tapping. At 40,000 words, this will be one of the most comprehensive surveys of how governments are monitoring the conversations and locations of their citizens.

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(Image Credit: Vodafone)