At the end of last month, the United Nations rediscovered,
when it asked Facebook for details of accounts run by Somali pirates, that it
is not the United States of America. That country’s National Security Agency
could get major US tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple to
provide them information and data sent and shared by the likes of you and me;
in fact, if Edward Snowden is to be believed, these setups were joined at the
hip with the NSA, giving the now six-year old PRISM programme direct access to massive
information-data mining on a gigantic scale.
On the other hand, the UN’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and
Eritrea was ignored by Facebook last month when it requested a discussion on
“information on Facebook accounts belonging to individuals involved in
hijackings and hostage-taking." Facebook said that the UN had no
jurisdiction.
I do not know what the UN hoped to accomplish with this
attempt at information gathering from a social networking site. Did some lazy
bureaucrat think he was going to sit behind a laptop and track down pirates and
their backers in real life halfway across the world? Did the Somali militant
group Al-Shabaab’s Twitter account shutdown in January (when they used it to
threaten to kill Kenyan hostages) give somebody at the UN a gleam in the eye? Does
anybody seriously expect pirates to make it easy to be tracked through social
networking sites?
All in all, it seems like a pretty useless thing to spend
the international community’s money on, but then the UN is known for spending
large amounts of money on useless things.
Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, too.
Somali piracy has declined, thanks to armed guards on ships (and little thanks
to the UN or the IMO.) On the other hand, piracy on the other coast of Africa
is doing quite well, thank you. Maybe the UN should focus its attention where
the problem exists. Judging by the numbers of emails telling me of lotteries I
have won, the Nigerians seem to use the internet copiously; I am sure they must be on Facebook too.
I expect legitimate law enforcement agencies, including from
those Asian countries whose seamen are badly affected by piracy, will probably
be obstructed by Facebook and the like too, should they ask for information. It
is a sign of the times that criminals can use sites like YouTube and others
quite effectively to get their message across- pirates putting up short films
of pathetic looking seamen hostages, threatening violence and demanding money,
for example, and the ‘good guys’ cannot use that information- or what is behind
that information- to track the criminals. Facebook, Microsoft, Google and the
like can give direct access to my account to the US government, but giving
indirect information to the UN on pirates is a no-no.
Actually, the problem is not Facebook but the international
community that the UN claims to represent. Assume, for a moment, that something
tangible was to be gained by the UN getting access to pirate profiles from
Facebook-that, by giving the UN the information it wanted, Facebook could have
helped in striking a blow against piracy. It chose not to. It chose to hide
behind some legalese, and the international community, represented by the UN,
seems to have accepted that. It appears that criminals have a right to privacy
but hostage crews do not.
No surprise then, that people like me wonder. When wars,
occupation and loot of countries like Iraq can be sanctioned based on confessed
lies at the UN, as in Colin Powell’s case, why it is that the truth cannot be
used to protect seamen and the ninety per cent of world trade figure that I am
so sick of hearing about?
If the US wanted, it could slap a subpoena on Facebook’s
ass before breakfast tomorrow morning, and Facebook would have to cough up
whatever the UN wanted it to.
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