Day 4 at #IGF2013

It’s the last day of a hectic week. Hectic for many of those in Bali who have been busy organising and participating in workshops, and hectic for many remote participants who have had to wake up very early or sleep very late to make up for the difference in timezones.

Internet surveillance was the main topic on the Taking Stock/Emerging Issues session agenda; a panel of speakers, moderated by two moderators (including Diplo’s Dr Jovan Kurbalija), also discussed government requests for user data, transparency, rule of law, and related issues.

Diplo’s team on the ground concluded that although there was no significant progress in terms of next steps or recommendations, ‘there were several clear references to existing international legal documents that could be applied in these cases, as well as to the Council of Europe’s complete palette of related conventions and resolutions on data protection, human rights, and security. It was generally seen as very positive that the IGF devoted one of its main sessions to such a burning emerging issue, showing that it is ready to be updated on and openly discuss any issue.’ The video recording of the main session is available here.

Also worth sharing are statistics gathered by Diplo’s social media aggregator: about 25,000 people tweeted using the #igf13 and #igf2013 hashtags; tweets with these hashtags reached almost 10 million tweople. Will IGF 2014, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, beat this number?

The Diplo team’s summary of Day 4 at http://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/igf-bali-day-4