European Cybercrime Treaty 1.1

(eternal_software) writes: "Reuters is reporting that the world's first cybercrime treaty is being redrafted after Internet lobby groups assailed it as a threat to human rights that could have 'a chilling effect on the free flow of information and ideas.'" The Council of Europe has added new passages to clarify, according to Reuters, "that 'cracking' computer systems to test security is legal and that ISPs would only be asked to store specific data related to a suspected crime."

Comments

Re:Please justify your assumption

[Ian Schmidt]

Excellent point, Bruce. Unfortunately it seems to be common now to "supercriminalize" Bad Things That Society Cares Deeply About which continue to happen in spite of already being illegal.

Everything from drugs to murder is getting extra layers of law added to make it "more illegal" as though it would actually help. In reality, I think all this helps is lawyers (since nobody else can understand the laws pertaining to a specific situation now) and Congressmen (who can claim to have taken a "tough stance" on cocaine or hate crimes or whatever).

Please justify your assumption

[Bruce Perens]

You are assuming that we need this treaty and the follow-on implementing law at all to prosecute criminals. I haven't seen that there's any problem prosecuting them now, without a new treaty and new law.

Thanks

Bruce

A proposal to solve "rewritten" laws:

[Anne Marie]

When laws and treaties are rewritten like this, the original is discarded and completely overwritten by the new; it's not accomplished by amendment -- it's by rewritten out of whole cloth. The new law may no longer be objectionable, but at the same time, its brief tyrannical status is not preserved for posterity. That job is today delegated to the media, who cannot be asked to maintain an archive of knowledge once its value for click-throughs and ad-supplements is exhausted.

What we need is for laws to be maintained in a CVS tree like most free software. We need to see what the law was before it became what it is today, because otherwise, we cannot hold our elected officials responsible for what they could have done if not for our eternal vigilence.
It would solve many judicial issues of "legislative intent", and it would allow a truly free society not to be blinded by nascent tyrrany. People are much less willing to give up privileges and rights they knew once existed (except for minor things like a 12-year-old age of consent in Victorian England) if they are made truly aware of what they used to have "in the good old days".