The UN's special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Joseph A. Cannataci, has told the UK government to "desist from setting a bad example to other states" with its new Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the Snooper's Charter). He is particularly concerned about bulk interception and bulk hacking, which "fail the standards of several UK Parliamentary Committees, run counter to the most recent judgements of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, and undermine the spirit of the very right to privacy."

In his first report since taking up the new post of special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Cannataci urged the UK government to "step back from taking disproportionate measures which may have negative ramifications far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom." He pointed out "the huge influence that UK legislation still has in over 25% of the UN’s members states that still form part of the Commonwealth."

In contrast to his renewed finger-wagging to the UK government—last year, he said that British surveillance was "worse than 1984"—Cannataci praised the three UK parliamentary committees "for their consistent, strong, if occasionally over-polite, criticism of the UK Government’s Investigatory Powers Bill." He went on to urge them "to continue, with renewed vigour and determination, to exert their influence in order that disproportionate, privacy-intrusive measures such as bulk surveillance and bulk hacking as contemplated in the Investigatory Powers Bill be outlawed rather than legitimised."

Cannataci was also pleased with two key judgments, from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), issued last year. The first was the ruling by the CJEU in the Schrems case. Although mostly about the Safe Harbour framework, which it effectively killed, the judgment laid down along the way conditions for mass surveillance to be legal in the EU. As Cannataci wrote in his report: "it will be interesting to see which European law legitimising mass surveillance, if any would pass the test of such a standard if the [CJEU] would be inclined to continue to apply it strictly in future." The ECtHR case similarly ruled that blanket surveillance is a violation of fundamental human rights.

As Cannataci points out in his report, it would seem that the Snooper's Charter in its present form would fall foul of both decisions. That raises the prospect of the new Investigatory Powers Bill, once passed, being challenged in Europe's two highest courts, with good chances of it being ruled illegal in one or both of them.

The UN's special rapporteur's report is not just about government attacks on privacy. As Cannataci warns: "In 2016 it would seem that much more data is held on the individual by corporations than that held by the state. The vast revenues derived from the monetisation of personal data to the extent that it has become a marketable and tradable commodity mean that the incentive for changing the business model simply on account of privacy concerns is not very high."

He recognised that this is a serious problem, and called for a wider debate and more research on the topic in order to establish "what type of information policy is most suitable to an approach which would maximise protection of and minimise risk to privacy of individual citizens in relation to the data collected about them by corporations."

Other sections of his wide-ranging report touch on open data, big data, DNA databases, and biometrics. Throughout, Cannataci is rather too fond of using the prefix "cyber." For example, he believes that: "Cyberspace risks being ruined by Cyberwar and Cyber-surveillance and that Governments and other stakeholders should work towards Cyberpeace. In this sense at least, privacy protection is also part of the Cyberpeace movement." At least he didn't call it Cyberprivacy.

In his conclusion, Cannataci says: "Privacy has never been more at the forefront of political, judicial and personal consciousness than in 2016." Judging by his first report, which only covers the first six months of his tenure as the UN's special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Cannataci aims to keep it that way.