Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, in cooperation with over 100 free speech groups and leading activists, has written an open letter to protest against the surveillance by governments across the world.

In the letter to the Open Government Partnership, they condemned the hypocrisy of member nations in signing up to an organization which aimed at preserving freedom and somehow ran one of the largest surveillance networks at the same time.

The letter was signed by such outfits as Oxfam, Privacy International and the Open Rights Group, and by such people as Satbir Singh of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Aruna Roy, an Indian social activist. The document calls on member governments to overhaul their privacy legislation, protect whistleblowers and ensure the transparency around their surveillance methods.

The letter says that the practices governments use today erode the checks and balances on which accountability depends. They also complain that such practices have a chilling effect on freedom of expression, information and association. The document underlines that the United Kingdom and the United States have maintained that regimes like China and Iran should ease restrictions on the Internet, while NSA leaks revealed that they themselves have been intercepting private communications.

Of course, the legislation to limit the state’s power to spy on its citizens is fundamental to democracy’s checks and balances, but the current laws are already outdated. Today digital technologies make it extremely easy to gather and store billions of pieces of information on entire populations, so the system of checks and balances on state power is approaching a breaking point. The initiative is calling for an urgent public debate to review and strengthen the safeguards which will keep the societies open.

The Open Government Partnership was created two years ago to help reformers committed to making their governments more accountable, open and responsive to people. Britain and America were first to join, and the outfit has since grown to include more than sixty nations from Australia to Mongolia.