We Are All Foreigners to Someone

This op-ed was originally published by The Guardian.

In recent weeks, the Hollywood film about Edward Snowden and the movement to pardon the NSA whistleblower have renewed worldwide attention on the scope and substance of government surveillance programs. In the United States, however, the debate has often been a narrow one, focused on the rights of Americans under domestic law but mostly blind to the privacy rights of millions of others affected by this surveillance.

Indeed, just last week, a British court held that British intelligence agencies acted unlawfully by concealing bulk spying programs from the public for over a decade. Soon, in a lawsuit brought by Privacy International, the ACLU and eight other organizations, the influential European court of human rights will also weigh in on surveillance programs revealed by Snowden, and the result could have implications far beyond Europe.

Read the rest at The Guardian