Torture and Security Service Mass Surveillance

Bulk interception of telecommunications by security services for the purposes of mass surveillance is a practice which challenges the right to privacy of individuals. While Article 17 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (ICCPR) requires states to protect people from all arbitrary interference with this right and while the UN General Assembly adopted The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age 2014 (the first of annual reports on the subject) as a response to revelations of mass surveillance which interfere with people's privacy, the effective delivery of the right seems elusive. In this chapter, we will make a comparison regarding the protection and implementation of another human right: the prohibition on torture, in order to understand what lessons can be learned from that experience for the purposes of the right to privacy. We examine how the pre-existing commitment of States to the prohibition on torture contained in Article 7 ICCPR and which is the subject of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 1984, was given effect through the Optional Protocol to the latter to provide an increasingly effective system of preventive oversight, including international and national human rights actors to ensure the further realisation of this human right. The objective of this investigation is to analyse how the international community working with national actors has established a system of oversight and preventive visits in respect of an international human right and whether such a system could be established to protect the right to privacy. The exponential development of computing capacities and interconnectivity which have accompanied the arrival of the internet and social media into everyone's lives has raised profound issues regarding the right to privacy and the protection of personal data. On the one hand, the possibility of contact with other people anywhere on the globe in a matter of nanoseconds and at no (direct) cost has proven exceptionally attractive to people. This chapter focuses on states' claim to an entitlement to collect and process personal data, the justifications which are given for such activities and how to protect the right to privacy in the face of them. It examines how the protection of another human right - the prohibition on torture - has given rise to new tools intersecting between the international, regional, and national frameworks to bring to the ground increas