Brazil

A United Nations committee has advanced a resolution sponsored by Brazil and Germany to make the right to privacy against unlawful surveillance applicable to anyone in the world, The Washington Post reported. The two countries sponsored the measure after revelations of monitoring  by the United States of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The resolution is expected to pass the United Nations General Assembly too, The Post further reported. While the resolution is not binding law, General Assembly resolutions " reflect world opinion and carry political weight," The Post also reported.

The largely symbolic resolution was watered down though. The Post reported: "The key compromise dropped the contention that the domestic and international interception and collection of communications and personal data, 'in particular massive surveillance,' may constitute a human rights violation."

With the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, one UN event looked at the role the United Nations could have, if any, regarding ensuring privacy on the Internet from governmental spying.

A blogger for Ars Technica who was on the panel and who wrote about the event "pointed out that while anti-democratic countries may want legitimacy, their policies are already well in place. Surveillance capabilities are already being used, with or without the UN’s approval or disapproval, by democratic and anti-democratic governments."

Another interesting point from the panel was a Brazilian representative who "referred to the fact that President Barack Obama had recently defended the global American spying effort: 'I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security, and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.'" 

The Brazilian official said in light of the revelations of American spying on the Brazilian president and a major Brazilian energy company '“Brazil has 100 percent inconvenience, 0 percent security, and 0 percent privacy.”' 

Along with the development this week that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off a state dinner in Washington over the National Security Agency's alleged spying on her and a Brazilian energy company, Brazil also is considering new Internet laws, the Wall Street Journal's Digits Blog reports. One of the proposals would require Internet firms to store data about Brazilians in Brazil, the blog reports, to give "the Brazilian government more control over Internet data, and Brazilian courts would more easily be able to issue orders for access to information about Brazilian users of services from foreign companies." Iit would be very difficult to enforce such a law in the globalized world in which people cross borders almost as easily as data does.