Peter Gallagher

Here’s what Andrew Stoler and I pro­pose. You’ll see the sim­i­lar­ity. Please down­load and review our paper. We’d really like to have your feed­back on this idea.

“In 2009, the most effec­tive way to make infor­ma­tion imme­di­ately avail­able around the globe is through the Inter­net. Addi­tional sur­veil­lance does not need to be ‘run’ by an exist­ing insti­tu­tion or even located in a sin­gle media out­let. But for prac­ti­cal pur­poses a sin­gle high pro­file web­site, funded and man­aged by for exam­ple, the World Bank, would improve the effec­tive­ness of sur­veil­lance. This pro­posal calls for the G-20 coun­tries to agree on some stan­dards that could be mon­i­tored at the web­site at their April 2009 meet­ing (more about these later). Sur­veil­lance would then oper­ate as follows:

• Par­tic­i­pat­ing gov­ern­ments (G-20 and any oth­ers who signed-on to the G-20 stan­dards) would be invited to notify actual or planned mea­sures by other gov­ern­ments that were incon­sis­tent with the stan­dards adopted by the G-20
• Pri­vate sec­tor bod­ies (busi­ness, non-business, aca­d­e­mic) and indi­vid­u­als would be able to post (mod­er­ated) infor­ma­tion on pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures and their (mod­er­ated) views on any noti­fied mea­sures. Pri­vate infor­ma­tion and com­ments would not be lim­ited to mea­sures breach­ing the stan­dards adopted by G-20 governments.
• G-20 gov­ern­ments, and oth­ers that signed on, would agree to respond to alle­ga­tions con­cern­ing a breach of the stan­dards within 10 days of the noti­fi­ca­tions appear­ing on the web­site. They may also respond to any other criticisms.”