GENEVA: A U.N. human rights expert has published a draft list of questions to measure countries' privacy safeguards, a first step towards ranking the governments that are potentially doing the most snooping on their own citizens.
As the first person in the job, Cannataci set out an action plan for tackling the task and said he planned to take a methodical approach to monitoring surveillance and privacy laws to help him to decide which countries to investigate. The 28 draft questions, each with a suggested score attached, begins with a potential five points if a country's constitution had a provision to protect privacy or has been interpreted to encompass such a protection.Under the first version of Cannataci's scoring system, systematic monitoring of private communications could subtract 55 points, as could intensive policing of the internet and monitoring of chatrooms.
The last question asks:"Does your country have a police and/or intelligence service which systematically profiles and maintains surveillance on large segments of the population in a manner comparable to that of the STASI in the 1955-1990 GDR ?"