Human Rights Watch Says Obama Not Gone Far Enough On NSA Reforms

On Friday (January 17), Obama banned eavesdropping on the leaders of allies and began reining in the vast collection of U.S. citizens' phone data, seeking to reassure Americans and foreigners that the United States would take into account privacy concerns highlighted by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations.But Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based group, told Reuters in Berlin, in an interview embargoed until Tuesday (January 21) to coincide with the release of its annual World Report, that Obama had provided little more than "vague assurance" on the monitoring of communications.

"Most important, he has not stopped the mass collection of all of our private electronic communications," he said. "He is not going to put them in a government computer anymore, he's going to put them in the computer of some new agency, he is going to establish that is ostensibly independent. But nonetheless, he still claims that we have no right in stopping the government from collecting this information. That that doesn't implicate our privacy rights."

Roth said the U.S. needed to stop gathering communications en masse, saying there was no proof that such vast surveillance had made a difference to security.

He likened the U.S. approach to putting a video camera in people's bedrooms and saying this did not violate privacy rights because the footage would only be looked at in the event of a security risk.

"Would you feel satisfied with that? Would you feel that your privacy has not been violated? Of course not. But that's exactly what the government is doing with our private communications," he said.

Obama said last week that collecting telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act - passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. - involved gathering phone numbers, times and durations of calls and said this metadata "can be queried if and when we have a reasonable suspicion that a particular number is linked to a terrorist organisation".

"So, it is still all in realm of governmental digression," Roth said. "We have a privacy right here that should be legally enforceable. And Obama has so far not been willing to take that logical step."

In its annual global report, HRW said there was a risk that governments would respond to the U.S. government's "overreaching" by preventing their citizens' data from leaving their home country, a move that could lead to more censorship of the Internet.

The Human Rights Watch report also was very critical of Russia, and calling on the international community not to take part in the prestigious opening ceremony of the Olympic games.

"It's important that the international community take a lesson from this. To recognize that Putin cares about his image, that stresses the need for public diplomacy as one way to put pressure on Putin to relax this repression, not simply for Sochi but over the longer term," Roth said. "And so we have urged leaders not to play into that strategy. And for the leaders themselves to boycott the opening ceremonies. Not to lend legitimacy to the Putin misrule through their high-level presence."