More than 500 renowned authors – including five Nobel laureates - from across the globe have signed a petition demanding an end to ‘mass surveillance’. It follows the revelations over the last few months of the US and other countries spying.
Their open appeal is called ‘A Stand for Democracy in the Digital
Age’. Among the signatories are Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk, JM
Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass and Tomas Tranströmer.
Others who signed the letter include Bjork, Umberto Eco, Yann
Martel, Ian McEwan and many others.
“WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people, as democratic citizens,
to determine to what extent their personal data may be collected,
stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where
their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the
deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and
stored. WE CALL ON ALL STATES AND CORPORATIONS to respect these
rights,” the open appeal read.
It adds that “a person under surveillance is no longer free;
a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To
maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in
virtual as in real space.”
The letter also calls for the creation by the UN an International
Bill of Digital Rights.
Everyone is invited to sign the open appeal at
www.change.org/surveillance
The petition comes in the wake of massive revelations by Edward
Snowden that disclosed surveillance all over the globe carried
out by NSA.
In the latest incident, it has been revealed that the NSA and the
UK’s GCHQ spying agencies collected players’ charts and deployed
real-life agents into the World of Warcraft and Second Life
online games.
The move was organized by a group of independent authors who made
it possible through personal contacts and private networks.
Danish writer, Janne Teller, one of the organizers, told the
Daily Mail that the authors’ community is “really very worried
about mass surveillance” which is “undermining democracy
totally.”
“I think it's quite significant when you have 560 or so of
the greatest contemporary writers, from all across the world,
expressing a very serious concern, because these are people who
always work on the big philosophical questions of life. Hopefully
their concern matters to politicians,” Teller added.
The concern listed by the appeal’s organizers is reflected in
statistics.
A recent survey by the writers' rights group PEN discovered that
85 percent of its US members are worried about government
surveillance, according to the organization’s report.
Twenty-eight percent had also curbed their social media use,
while 24 percent are avoiding certain topics in phone and email
conversations.