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	New PEN Report demonstrates global chilling effect of Mass Surveillance by Suzanne Nossel PEN America   Fear of government surveillance is prompting writers worldwide—even those residing in countries that claim to uphold free expression—to self-censor their works, according to a new report by international literary association PEN American, leading to a "devastating impact" on the freedom of information.   The report, Global Chilling: The Impact of Mass Surveillance on International Writers (pdf), found that more than half of the 800 writers surveyed think that mass government surveillance has "significantly damaged U.S. credibility as a global champion of free expression for the long term."   Further, according to the survey, writers living in countries defined as "Free" by U.S.-based NGO watchdog Freedom House expressed an almost equal level of concern about surveillance as those living in countries defined as "Not Free" (75% and 80%, respectively), prompting notable levels of self-censorship.   "The levels of self-censorship reported by writers living in liberal democracies are astonishing, and demonstrate that mass surveillance programs conducted by democracies are chilling freedom of expression among writers," the report notes. According to the survey, 34 percent of writers living in liberal democracies admitted to self-censoring, compared with 61 percent of writers living in authoritarian countries, and 44 percent in semi-democratic countries.   "Writers are reluctant to speak about, write about, or conduct research on topics that they think may draw government scrutiny. This has a devastating impact on freedom of information as well: If writers avoid exploring topics for fear of possible retribution, the material available to readers—particularly those seeking to understand the most controversial and challenging issues facing the world today—may be greatly impoverished."   Survey respondents also voiced concern that surveillance by the U.S. government and "Five Eyes" partner countries (which include Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand) has damaged their reputation abroad and thus their ability to champion free expression and other human rights around the world.   When asked, "how have recent revelations about U.S. government surveillance programs affected the United States’ credibility on free expression issues around the world?" roughly 60 percent of writers in both Western Europe and the Five Eyes countries said that U.S. credibility "has been significantly damaged for the long term."   "The USA has fundamentally damaged the "Western" model of human and citizen’s rights," one respondent wrote, "turning large parts of the world’s population (including the U.S. population) into right-less objects of surveillance and secret intelligence operations."   The international survey follows a 2013 PEN report which found that in the months following NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden"s disclosures of widespread government surveillance, American writers had become "overwhelmingly worried" about government overreach and one in six had reported self-censoring as a result.   A June 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch also found that journalists and lawyers were increasingly avoiding work on controversial topics over fear of government spying.   "Surveillance is insidious," said Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director of PEN American Center. "While governments may intend these bulk collection programs to be used only to detect terrorist wrongdoing, people under surveillance change their behavior to avoid triggering scrutiny. Because the programs are so broad, they could affect billions of people whose sense of privacy and creative freedom is curtailed."   The survey, conducted by non-partisan research firm the FDR Group, comes in advance of a full report to be released this spring. PEN hopes these results will inform public and Congressional debates on the future of mass surveillance. The group is calling for "the right to be free of unwarranted surveillance" to be made a "cornerstone of U.S. surveillance policy and practice."   In addition, PEN American proposes a number of legislative reforms, including allowing provisions of the Patriot Act to expire and ending surveillance programs carried out under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and Executive Order 12333.   http://www.pen.org/press-release/2015/01/05/new-pen-report-demonstrates-global-chilling-effect-mass-surveillance http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/07/28/liberty-monitor-all http://www.pen-international.org/newsitems/china-writers-and-publishers-arrested-in-a-new-wave-of-repression-2/   January 2015   European human rights body finds spying programs endanger lives, consume valuable anti-terrorist resources.   Mass surveillance programs threaten fundamental human rights and may do more harm than good in the anti-terrorism fight, the top human rights organization in Europe said in a report published Monday.   "Our freedom is built on what others do not know of our existences." Thus begins the report (pdf) by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), with a quote from Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The report found that the invasive and widespread government intelligence programs revealed in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "endanger fundamental human rights" as guaranteed by the European convention on human rights, including privacy, freedom of expression, fair trial, and freedom of religion.   "These rights are cornerstones of democracy," PACE said. "Their infringement without adequate judicial control jeopardizes the rule of law."   Moreover, those programs consume valuable resources, while providing little in the way of security. PACE continues:   Mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials. Instead, resources that might prevent attacks are diverted to mass surveillance, leaving potentially dangerous persons free to act.   Intelligence agencies are also actively threatening internet security by systematically seeking out, using, or even creating "back doors" and other weaknesses online that could be exploited by cyber-criminals or repressive governments, the report states, adding:   "The consequences of mass surveillance tools such as those developed by the US and allied services falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes would be catastrophic."   The assembly''s legal committee called for:   The collection of personal data without consent only following "a court order granted on the basis of reasonable suspicion"; "Credible, effective protection" for whistle-blowers exposing unlawful surveillance; Better judicial and parliamentary control of intelligence services; An "intelligence codex" defining mutual obligations that secret services could opt into; An inquiry into member states’ use of mass surveillance using powers under the European Convention on Human Rights.   Another concern named in the report is the use of mass surveillance to justify the existence of "secret laws, secret courts and secret interpretations of such laws."   In April 2014, Snowden spoke to the assembly through a video link from Moscow, Russia, where he has been granted asylum since 2012. During that conference, he revealed to assembly members that the NSA had targeted non-governmental organizations and other civil groups for its surveillance sweeps, both inside and outside of the U.S.   "Before the ever-growing ''surveillance-industrial complex'' spins completely out of control, we must act, in order to subject surveillance to the rule of law," the report states. Otherwise, "nobody and nothing is safe from snooping by our own countries'' and even foreign intelligence services."   http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-EN.asp?newsid=5387&lang=2&cat=5 Visit the related web page
	Challenging financial sector backing to land enclosures by Shalmali Guttal Focus on the Global South, agencies   In 2011, Olivier de Schutter, then UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food cautioned, “The commodification of land, which the global phenomenon of land-grabbing is accelerating, entails risks that go far beyond what the current proposals for regulating it seem willing to recognize.”   The risks he alluded to stem from treating land, labour and money as mere tradable commodities and allowing market mechanisms to be the sole arbiter of society, culture and nature. Adequately addressing them would require subordinating markets to the interests of society and the natural environment, recognizing non commoditized valuations of land and nature in ‘official’ governance discourse and practice, and putting in place national and international regulations that stop rather than encourage land grabbing.   Private and state enclosures of lands, forests and water, now generally referred to as land, water and resource grabbing, are not new phenomena; struggles for control over the ownership, use, management and governance of land, water, territory and their associated wealth are central motifs in colonial and other national histories. Nor has land ever been out of markets: what grows naturally on land, what is grown by humans on land, what flows on and under land, what forms landscapes and eco-systems, what is built on land, and what is extracted from under the land, have all been commodities in some market or the other over the past centuries.   What is new about the current era of enclosures is the array of means, mechanisms and instruments by which political and economic control over land and nature are exercised, and by which land and land-based wealth are becoming commodities in new markets. Developing countries with large agrarian economies have thrown their borders open to foreign direct investment (FDI) in the agricultural and natural resource sectors, ostensibly to spur economic growth and create employment. Many of these investments are backed by complex financing arrangements and multiple sources of capital, including public, private and multilateral financiers.   The spread of neoliberalism in much of the world since the 1980s provided new impetus to the corporate capture of agriculture and food systems through vertically integrated value chains that included land, labour, inputs, credit, processing, distribution and retailing.   Financial deregulation allowed commodity markets to expand rapidly and into new areas through new financial instruments, and also allowed new actors to enter the land-agricultural-food investment arenas. Investment banks created new types of investment instruments such as commodity index funds that amalgamated agricultural commodities, lands, minerals and energy futures, and directed floods of unregulated investment capital towards land and nature. Many agricultural derivatives transformed risk itself into a new assets class, thus increasing the volatility of commodity prices and economic uncertainty for small-scale agricultural producers who had no protection against market risks.   Over the past 10 years, sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms, insurance companies, pension and hedge funds, investment banks and other finance corporations have become implicated in land, forest, mineral and water deals as financial underwriters as well as direct investors. While land itself is immovable, financialization enables the wealth that springs from it to move across the world and be traded in distant markets.   Natural, ecological, social, cultural, nutritional, health and even economic values associated with land are reduced to exchangeable financial instruments (such as derivatives) and a single landscape can be subjected to more than one financialization scheme, for example, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), forest carbon trading and a fast-growing tree plantation.   The subversion of rights, regulation and governance   Land, water and resource grabbing are human rights violations and have far reaching negative impacts on environmental quality, biodiversity, society, culture, employment, livelihoods, health and local peoples’ access to basic/essential goods and services. Promises made by investors to affected communities of providing employment, schools, health and other social services rarely materialize; jobs are poorly paid, precarious, often with unsafe work conditions, and distress out-migration is common.   Local populations are robbed of their agency to make decisions about how to use, manage and govern their lands and territories, and of their ability to participate in political processes as migrants. Those who resist the incursions on their lands and territories face violent threats, intimidation, arbitrary arrests and incarceration, extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearance.   States enable these enclosures by enacting policies, laws and regulations that favor markets and by using their legal and security apparatus to suppress and punish those who resist. International financial institutions (IFIs), multilateral agencies, international policy institutions, transnational corporations (TNCs) and even some civil society organisations (CSOs) have sought to re-frame and re-present land, water and resource grabbing as “win-win” investments whereby investors can secure the assets they covet by meeting conditions outlined in voluntary codes of conduct to minimize negative impacts.   IFIs—for example the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank group) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB)–provide financing, policy advice and technical support to governments and private firms sector actors for investments in agriculture, infrastructure, energy, urban development, and extractive industry, which demand secure access by investors to land, water and natural resources.   The World Bank has played a central role in promoting land markets in developing countries by financing land tenure administration reforms that established private property regimes, eased land transactions and enabled wealthy and powerful individuals to use land for financial and speculative gain.   Anticipating water shortages as Asian economies intensify their pursuit of economic growth, the ADB has proposed a comprehensive framework for water governance that promotes water markets, water trade and increased private investment in water services and infrastructure.   The Green Economy, elaborated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 with the support of multilateral agencies, IFIs, states, private sector and environmental organisations, further advances financialisation by proposing a system of natural resource appropriation and commodification whereby eco-systems and biodiversity are valued in monetary terms rather than the varieties of life they sustain.   The Green Economy treats nature, its functions and its capacities as “natural capital,” and aims to estimate appropriate economic values for the vital eco-system services that forests, trees, lakes, wetlands and river basins provide by capturing and storing carbon, creating water catchments, ensuring the stability of water cycles, soil fertility, local micro-climates for safe habitats, nurturing and regenerating biodiversity (including fisheries), etc. These values are considered crucial components of a country’s “natural capital,” and can be packaged and traded in international markets to attract investment and development finance.   The capture of land, forests, water sources and minerals are justified by states and many policy actors through narratives of global hunger and food scarcity, classifying lands as “idle, empty or under-used,” energy needs to meet development goals, tackling climate change and even environmental protection as described by journalist John Vidal in the “The great green land grab.” In order to satisfy commodity, food, energy, finance and conservation markets, the rights of local communities and populations to make decisions about the use, management and governance of lands and eco systems that sustain them are wrested away and replaced by regulatory regimes that enable commodification and financialization.   Proposals to regulate land and nature based investments promoted by the World Bank, ADB and other IFIs, G-7/8, International Land Coalition and similar alliances do not aim to stop the commodification of land and nature. Rather, they provide conditions by which medium and large-scale investors can acquire land and associated resources with veneers of responsibility, transparency, democracy and participation. Voluntary codes of conduct may bring about some welcome changes in the way investments proceed but the actual facts of land and resource grabs will continue.   Rethinking governance   For those whose lives, livelihoods, cultures, societies and identities are turned upside down by destructive investments, land and resource grabbing cannot be regulated; they must be unconditionally stopped. The discourse and practice of governance must be reoriented to prioritize the rights of local populations and communities while respecting nature and the carrying capacity of earth.   “Keeping Land Local: Reclaiming Governance from the Market” explores some of the challenges facing peasants, farmers, forest dwellers, fisher-folk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and other local communities in their efforts to build systems for the governance of land, water, forests and territories that are just, participatory, ecologically sound and foster genuinely sustainable forms of living.   * Shalmali Guttal is Coordinator, Defending the Commons Programme, at Focus on the Global South. Visit the related web page
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