wr2014_web_0

WORLD REPORT 2014and the Obama administration refuses to take public responsibility for carryingout all but a few attacks.The US government seems to feel no urgency to demonstrate the lawfulness of itsuse of drones for attacks because for the moment it stands nearly alone in usingthem. But that will certainly change, and Washington will undoubtedly rue theprecedents it has set of enabling governments to label anyone deemed to be athreat as a “combatant” subject to attack under the laws of war, rather than abidingby the more protective standards of human rights law.Because of the disclosures of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the world is nowaware of the virtually unchecked mass electronic surveillance that the US governmentand certain allies, most notably Britain, is conducting. No one questionsthat national security sometimes requires governments to use targeted surveillanceafter making an evidentiary showing. But the US government’s mass surveillancewithout such limits has largely eradicated the right to privacy in a modernworld that virtually requires electronic communication.To justify this conduct, the US government has invoked a series of legal assumptionsthat do not withstand serious scrutiny, even though most have been ratifiedby a secret and deferential Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that hears onlythe government’s arguments. For example, the government feels free to collectmetadata about potentially all phone calls in the US because, under woefully outdatedrules, no one is said to have any legitimate expectation of privacy when itcomes to this information because they share it with the phone company. Despitea huge percentage of the world’s Internet and phone communications passingthrough the United States, the government has adopted the policy that non-Americans outside the country have no recognized privacy interest in even thecontent of their communications. And the government conveniently claims thatthe right to privacy is not implicated when it collects communications, only whenit examines them—as if it would be okay for the government to collect and store avideo stream from peoples’ bedrooms so long as it purports not watch the videountil it comes up with some compelling reason.Global outrage at this trampling on the right to privacy offers some promise ofchange. Brazil and Germany, for example, sponsored a unanimously adopted UNGeneral Assembly resolution demanding further study of the violation of privacy14