Source: IP Watch

More than 250 academics from around the world have signed a declaration strongly calling for a stop to surveillance of citizens’ communications online by US and European authorities. And in December, more than 500 top authors joined a coalition called Writers against Mass Surveillance calling for international rules to curb wholesale surveillance.

“Intelligence agencies monitor people’s Internet use, obtain their phone calls, email messages, Facebook entries, financial details, and much more,” the academics’ declaration states. “Agencies have also gathered personal information by accessing the internal data flows of firms such as Google and Yahoo. Skype calls are ‘readily available’ for interception. Agencies have purposefully weakened encryption standards – the same techniques that should protect our online banking and our medical files. These are just a few examples from recent press reports. In sum: the world is under an unprecedented level of surveillance. This has to stop.”

The academics reach across every continent and fields such as human rights, law, privacy, sociology, security and media. They were spurred by the discoveries of surveillance revealed last year Edward Snowden. Signatures are still being collected.

The remainder of the January 2014 declaration is as follows:

“The right to privacy is a fundamental right. It is protected by international treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Without privacy people cannot freely express their opinions or seek and receive information. Moreover, mass surveillance turns the presumption of innocence into a presumption of guilt. Nobody denies the importance of protecting national security, public safety, or the detection of crime. But current secret and unfettered surveillance practices violate fundamental rights and the rule of law, and undermine democracy.