Privacy, surveillance and free speech in T&T

The public alarms rather belatedly activated by Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie’s revelations about the company’s purported work in T&T several years ago offer an opportunity for anyone with a genuine interest in human rights and freedom of expression to nuance the discussion into a more informed one than is currently on offer.

I am initiating this modest start, because I have so far not seen much by way of informed public commentary on the implications of threats to privacy when it comes to other rights, and the degree to which we in T&T are already partially submerged in the resulting quagmire.

The fact of the matter is that, in a fundamental sense, attempts at gratuitous derogations of the right to privacy have long been active pursuits of political administrations across the aisle in T&T, and this part of the world.

Now, this is not to render anything disclosed in Wylie’s Mindf*ck or last year’s US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings or the earlier revelations of a UK Guardian investigation of lesser concern or interest, but just to say that the predisposition of our political parties and the people who support them have never sturdily equated privacy with other inalienable human rights.

The international body on whose Council I currently sit, IFEX, accommodates Privacy International alongside organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation which looks at digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, and journalism organisations such as the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and others.

This combination of specialised interests converges at the point where there is recognition of the inter-connectedness of human rights.

It is not inconsistent that the people involved in these organisations advocate for greater transparency on the part of officialdom while at the same time insist that breaches of personal and collective privacy can have the impact of undermining the ability to operate freely as citizens and as communities of interest.

This is among the reasons why it is entirely conceivable that journalists and their representative organisations can fuss over the current wave of data protection and cyber-crime laws in this part of the world which enjoy bipartisan support and can reduce the capacity of journalists and whistle-blowers to play active roles in delivering truth to power.

Mindf*ck is earning bestseller status in T&T, for instance, not long after the Media Association has had to less spectacularly argue (against strong resistance and passive opposition) that data protection legislation as conceptualised here stands in the way of the conduct of untrammeled information flows.

We are also in the throes of the imminent imposition of surveillance activities to regulate the online conduct of citizens (about which there are legitimate concerns and are perhaps already actionable under common law and existing statute) but through which a chilling effect on free expression is more than likely to prevail.

The problem with many of these ad hoc, knee-jerk measures is that they, at their core, refuse to recognise the nature of free expression as not only the right to disseminate information, entertainment, views and news, but also an entitlement to seek and to receive such content.

It is, in this context, always irksome to hear people talk about freedom of the press as a matter only concerned with the activities of the media, without regard for the fact that such a freedom intrinsically includes the rights of the consumers of mass communication.

It is true that increasingly popular governance frameworks for the operators of online platforms can have the impact of restraining unbridled technological power, and there is a very sophisticated international discussion on this issue. But there is always a danger of over-emphasising the role of state power in the reining-in of such influence and even control.

For further illumination we may turn to the guidance of international conventions that prescribe a right to communicate privately without interference, except under the most limited circumstances.

How good it would be to have the most recent cohort of graduating attorneys pay attention to such matters. Senator Sophia Chote forgot about this in her wise counsel to them last weekend.

Anyone challenging or gloating over Wylie’s revelations must also embrace an introspective on how we truly feel about such matters. This is more than just PNM/UNC business.

(First published in the T&T Guardian in November 2019)