Mass electronic surveillance by intelligence agencies violates “the very essence of the right to privacy” and threatens international law, according to the official report released Wednesday by the United Nations counter-terrorism investigator.

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“The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” Ben Emmerson, UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, concluded in the report, entitled Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism.

In fact, the programs are so “corrosive of online privacy” that their targets—the whole of internet users—should be able to protect their rights in court, Emmerson states.

“[A]ny Internet user,” Emmerson writes, “should have standing to challenge the legality, necessity and proportionality of the measures.”

The report is a response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed the agency’s invasive and widespread surveillance tactics that included monitoring telecommunications data and metadata of virtually all U.S. citizens and people around the world.

Those techniques endanger the privacy rights of “literally every Internet user,” Emmerson writes. Merely claiming that they can help suppress or prosecute terrorist acts is not “an adequate human rights law justification.”

While “targeted surveillance” requires prior suspicion of an individual or organization to conduct spying operations, mass surveillance programs like Prism—one of the NSA systems exposed by Snowden in 2013—collect vast swaths of telecommunications data across the board. Its methods are “incompatible with existing concepts of privacy,” the report states.

Much of the report focuses on how mass surveillance violates articles of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, a treaty signed and ratified by all member states of the Five Eyes alliance—the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, several of which have recently come under fire for their secretive data collection programs.

The violation of Article 17 is particularly egregious, as the article guarantees that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home and correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.”