The past 70 years privacy advocacy suffered from a lack of casualties of the issue; at least a lack of casualties reported by Western media. The NSA-files, leaked via whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that meta data and cell phone tracking technology is used to discover targets and to launch lethal drone strikes on targets by the US government (G. Greenwald and J. Scahill, ‘The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program’ First Look: the Intercept, 10 February 2014, available on: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/, last visited 16 June 2014).
There seems to be a complete lack of emergency with regard to stopping (or at least investigating) these activities, and nation states as well as international bodies show little policy response to these facts. European states still exchange meta data with USA intelligence services; data that exist because of decisions made during the design phase of protocols and their implementations in everyday technology. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the potential of data minimization in helping to limit the injustice caused by mass surveillance and assassinations with unmanned aerial vehicles. However, data minimization and data processing minimization have become information management policy requirements rather than technical design principles.
In this contribution the incentives of states to collaborate in (meta) data exchange will be investigated. The speakers will point to the policy decisions that are made by the European institutions and national governments with regard to international intelligence cooperation, IT development and fundamental rights protection. This talk will show that there are no policy incentives to change meta data production, collection, exchange and exploitation and, therefore, the speakers call upon all scientists and computer engineers to effect data minimization in a technical manner. Scientists and engineers have the moral obligation to implement data minimization into protocols and systems because a lack of information privacy turns out to be lethal.