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Reading the Fine Print on the Cybercrime Treaty
Anonymous Coward writes: "Mike Godwin, Former Counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of Cyber Rights writes about a new international treaty on cybercrime known as the "Convention on Cybercrime." The Council of Europe, a 43-nation public body created to promote democracy and the rule of law, is nominally drafting the treaty. The primary architect is the United States Department of Justice which is using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses."
The article is written from the perspective of an American: 'What happens if US citizens get the FBI pouncing on them because Bulgaria has made a request?'.
As a European (Brit), I'm more concerned about the US interference in this matter. As the article states, the DOJ is pushing for this and they're not even a member of the Council of Europe. And it's more likely that the US will make demands on other nations, than vice versa - A similar thing happened with Norway(?) over the DeCSS issue. The people who will benefit from this are likely to be US corporations and organisations such as the RIAA and MPAA - why else would the DOJ be pushing it?
Essentially, the US Government is influenced by big business and they in turn are influencing foreign governments. At the moment, I can post the DeCSS code on my website, and put up information about reverse engineering etc. It's legal in the UK. I don't want the American government using their influence to change my countries laws for their benefit.
... True, some pornography is legal in the us, and other countries, but certain content is almost universally recognized as being obscene.
This is your assertion, all you now need is some evidence, anecdotal or otherwise to back it up.
For instance, some Muslim countries would consider a photo of a woman showing her bare face or ankles to be pornography, while some asian countries consider prepubescent girls engaged in sex acts to be allowable.
??? You've just tried to back up your assertion of a universal moral position with an example of a difference in moral position. I'm afraid your logic is completely broken.
This is precisely why we need to define the boundaries of what can and cannot be displayed on the internet.
Why? So you can impose your version of morality on a world that has evidently differing standards of morality by your own example?
Your argument is consistent except the instance you've chosen to illustrate your first assertion actually demonstrates the opposite of assertion.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
to amount to freedom of speech. What was your point?
You are incorrect. Treaties must be constitutional.
Treaties are limited
But it is dangerous because they are trying to do things our own legislature did not want. It is marketed like : well all these countries aggreed so we should too.
Quote from the link:
"A related and most preposterous allegation is that a treaty "can cut across the rights given the people by the constitutional Bill of Rights"--than which nothing could be further from the truth, partly for two reasons:..."
That's exactly the point of the treaty. It was designed to implement a set of standards to determine what is and is not appropriate. While all governments have differing views regarding legality of various content, the treaty is a global initiative to come to a common agreement and comprimise on a set of universally recognized standards.
"Well, for starters, pornography is still legal on the U.S., as it is on many other countries."
True, some pornography is legal in the us, and other countries, but certain content is almost universally recognized as being obscene. For instance, some Muslim countries would consider a photo of a woman showing her bare face or ankles to be pornography, while some asian countries consider prepubescent girls engaged in sex acts to be allowable. This is precisely why we need to define the boundaries of what can and cannot be displayed on the internet.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
In other words, if you ratify a treaty that has something unconstitutional in it, it is no more (or less) permanent than an unconstitutional federal law. Treaties are on the same footing as federal law, which is to say hierarchically under the U.S. Constitution but over state constitutions or laws.
The real problem here is the same as bad patents, only worse: Once you have a bad treaty, you have to make, literally, a federal case out of it to get it thrown out. So if you want to pull some sleazy stunt with the law, it is even easier to do it in a foriegn forum, with no elected or particularly answerable participants, than it is in a Congress - convenience, not conspiracy. Who is going to read a treaty the size of a New York telephone directory? This is bad, but it isn't the black helicopter people coming to get you.
I wrote parts of this stuff
I have no idea. Like I said, IANAL. But, I simply don't like the idea of betting potentialy large sums of money on a company deciding not to enforce a contract clause. If ISPs and others with similar clauses (such as re-hosting companies) don't have any intention of using them, why put them in?
Once upon a time, I was a simple trusting soul who basically thought that if I dealt with large reputable firms all would be well. However, a few months of reading Slashdot (DeCSS, cue-cat etc) has lead me to the conclusion that large companies and corporations couldn't care less about screwing their customers over. My policy is now not to rely on trust.
Of course, if someone who is a UK lawyer were to demonstrate that I have nothing to worry about and that these clauses would not be enforceable then that would make my life significantly easier.
Well, obviously, this often isn't physically possible because the agreement is an online contract-o-matic, (which I agree may not be legally binding). The solution wiith my current cable provider was to sign the paper agreement, which didn't mention indemnity and then click "I don't agree" at the contract-o-matic. This means that I don't get any email addresses or web space, but I can get those elsewhere and they haven't complained. As an additional protection, I pay by monthly cheque rather than direct debit. That way they need to take me to court to get money rather than just taking it and leaving me to fight to get it back again.
they wouldn't turn away good business.
Maybe not in the USA, but here in the UK following the Demon libel case ISPs are very nervous and will drop people's accounts at the first hint of trouble. If someone strike a clause then they are going to instantly suspect trouble!
You missed the crucial paragraph explaining yourself properly...
:-) So it's a matter of establishing these base standards which are globally enforced.
As you say, some porn is legal in Western countries, but what's considered mild (or even completely innocent here, eg. a woman with an unveiled face) is considered otherwise in other countries. Or other countries (eg. Japan) may be more lax on the porn allowed (particularly in manga/cartoon form) than the West generally is.
But there are some universal standards out there. Sexual abuse of children is one - pix showing this are universally out. And fraud is always bad (no nation I know uses the Ferengi laws!
After that, if one country allows its net users to display kinky sex on their homepage, and another won't allow unveiled women on your pages, so be it. That's national jurisdiction for you. The fact that you can see pages with these pix from anywhere in the world is immaterial for national laws, and cutting those would require filtering by the more oppressive countries. The issue here isn't that they want to impose a standard from above which conflicts with other countries, but that they want to get a global statement of what's legal as a baseline - the intersection of every legal system.
Grab.
Well, I can think of an example that happened right here in the good ol' US of A. Does any one remember the Sedition Act of 1798 from history class? Seems it was a federal crime to say, write or publish anything opposed to the government. This treaty sounds like the proverbial 'nose of the camel' we have been warned about. It also sounds like the old line, If you are inocent you have nothing to fear. Well I am innocent, or at least not guilty, and I fear police of all types and jurisdictions. Yesterday it was a stopable offence in my state (NJ) if you were a minority. Who knows what will be next. Perhaps people who voice dissatisfaction at the 'shrub's' policies. Didn't 'they' already fire a government contractor for posting unflatering information on caribo herds and the Arctic Wildlife Refuge?
The treaty has supporters, of course. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America Association, and the Business Software Alliance all favor the treaty's requirement that certain copyright infringements be handled under criminal law.
What a surprise.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
????
You've gotta stop doing those 'ludes and drinking at the same time, man. One day those bugs crawling on the walls will get you.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Average person online: Means nothing. After all, if you're a law abiding citizen who is good and righteous in all things then you should welcome this because only bad people get into trouble.
Bad person online: (and you know who you are) This will mean that everything you do online will be watched, tracked and reported. Which is as it should be, because you're a bad person.
No just kidding. I'm trolling. It basically means the Internet is FUCKED. Because not only does your government (that you elected, presumably) get to throw your sorry ass in jail, but it means some tin-pot dicator (libya?) will get to do the same.
Do you want to speak out against the French? Don't do it online. I'm sure its illegal in France, and therefore the US government will be obliged to be an agent of France.
More than likely though, this will be used by RIAA/MPAA groups to hound people in Europe and Asia so that the government is using foreign governments to criminally prosecute what are essentially civil disagreements.
But hey, Copyright is so fucking important, that we might as well be good corporate sheep and pay money everytime we fart because that's already been copyrighted.
To those of you who think this promotes "balance", get your head out of your ass. We lost balance about 30 years ago and we're all running behing a huge boulder marked "corporate interests".
Surely you mean: "This is precisely why we cannot defined the boundaries of what can and cannot be displayed on the internet."
Some people find Teletubbies offensive on moral grounds. If you want to legislate the net that way, you end up with total ban on everything.
However every ISP that I have ever dealt with has had an indemnity clause in their user agreement. Now, IANAL, but I get the impression that I have agreed that if my ISP spends money in staff and legal costs investigating a complaint about me from police in for example Riga or Washington then they can send me the bill and I will have to pay it.
Note: I am in the UK, but I assume that a similar system exists in other countries?
Flashbacks to "Animal Farm"...
Kasreyn turns to Benjamin the Goat...
"Benjamin, my eyes are failing. Can you read to me what the First Commandment says?"
The old donkey sighed, then squinted at the side of the old barn... Finally, he spoke.
"Every animal is allowed freedom of his thoughts and ideals, as long as they are not expressed in a way that would offend others."
Kasreyn sighed. "I could have sworn it used to say something about freedom of speech... didn't you? Well, I guess it doesn't really matter - Comrade Napoleon is always right."
Does this strike anyone else as VERY FUCKING SCARY? This is the fucking U.N. charter, and it doesn't include freedom of speech, but everyone just *assumes* it does.
It really does feel to me like the part from the middle of Animal Farm, where the pigs were surreptitiously rewriting the Commandments, with no one the wiser. Finally they were able to abuse the other animals terribly, all the while claiming it was merely their virtuous prerogative under the laws.
I think Orwell's little attempt at humor or consolation, in calling it a "Fairy Tale", was misguided, even in as bleak a pessimist as he.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Of course, the authorities do not have an answer to this. They may not want to have an answer to this.
The mental health authorities do not have any answer to this. Yet you would think they would have some effective answer to trustworthiness that would not have orwellian overtones. But their focus is not on human values like social virtues like being trustworthy. Their focus is very much elsewhere. Ultimately their focus is on control.
But I do not blame them for this, because that is not where the money is. For many many years the big bucks for research have gone into the high profit areas, such as advertising and drugs. Madison Avenue has paid billions of dollars to find out how to more effectively manipulate their market. The drug research has gone to helping people be outwardly calm and peaceful. NOTE: Calm and peaceful sounds nice, but I do not think that calm and peaceful is always an appropriate response to a situation. But being passive is often defined as the appropriate and healthiest response
This is troubling in the context of the emerging Global legal system. The rule used to be that you had to be in a country to break it's laws (such as a traffic accident). Now we have a problem of WHOSE laws and standards are going to be enforced world wide. The emerging answer is EVERYONES, and when in doubt, well you have the lunacy of France barring Yahoo for content on USA sites.
We'll have to have porno like disclaimers saying "warning this content may be illegal outside of the USA" with perl and java setup to block access from non-USA ip addresses.
The fragmentation of the Internet continues, and the legal system is a bloody mess.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When Canada and the United States wanted to harmonize the technical requirements for equipment that would be attached to the telephone systems in the two countries, they started and promoted an open forum for the exchange of ideas, of proposals, and of implementation techniques. The same process continues under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), again in the sunshine of open exchange. With the ITU, you may not have direct access, but you do have input through your country's standards-making process.
With this treaty, we have a branch of the United States government supported by taxpayer dollars acting as a "consultant" to a European treaty body without full knowledge and consent of the people footing the bill, let alone preventing citizens from having any input into what is proposed. In other words, the law enforcement arm of the Poster Boy For Democracy is engaging in secret talks that affect the bill-payers, and the results of that political end-run is made public only after the concrete has been poured and cured in the document.
Why was the FBI involvement kept secret? Why was there no notice before the United States sent its advisors to Europe?
Perhaps it is time for the EFF to use FIOA to get a record of who did what, and exactly what process was used to make this happen.
Then friggin' monitor their time on the Internet for pete's sake! You are the parent, it is what you are supposed to be doing. Think about what you want to allow and what you don't want to allow then sit your kids down and set the groundrules. I work in an IT department and every parent with children your age do this. When my son id at that age I will have to do the same thing. Heck I have one co-worker who has set up VNC on his teen's PC and occassionally checks to make sure the chat conversations are appropriate. Hint, your children are too young to be on the Internet without some parental supervision and even with the cybercrime treaty that issue wouldn't change.
What is the difference between telling a child not to trust every person they meet in a chatroom and telling the child not to wander off with a stranger in a mall?
What is the differnce between telling your child to be home by the time the streetlights are on and saying Internet time is over at 8 pm?
What is the differnce between having a rule that your 5 year old must stay in the yard within your sight and only allowing the child to visit the Disney and Teletubbie websites?
And what do you do when your child breaks one of their "real world" rules? I doubt nothing. And what do you do when your child is exposed to something you consider inappropriate? Daddy, why did that man call that other man a *insert obsenity here*. Or they see the news and hear about a rape/murder victim.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
IP laws from the U.S.A.
Encryption laws from the UK.
Privacy from the Russia.
The only part of the article that concerns me is this statement:
"The primary architect is the United States Department of Justice which is using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses."
I don't understand how this couldn't benefit citizens and businesses. It seems to me that any law inforcement group that focuses on bring justice and order to the Internet can only be beneficial to ordinary citizens and businesses. Wouldn't you like to see a crackdown on all the pornography, child molesters and fraud that exists on the internet. Unless you're a peddler of fraudulent goods or services, or a pornographer, this could only be helpful to most people.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Second, it requires nations to develop standard procedures to capture and retrieve online and other information. Nations would have to be able to issue "retention orders" that would "freeze" data on any
computer. Governments would also need the ability to capture in real time the time and origin of all traffic on a networks, including telephone networks. For serious crimes, they would be required to
intercept the actual content of the communications.
Third, nations would have to cooperate with other nations in sharing electronic evidence across borders. And this cooperation requirement would apply to all crimes. They don't have to be the cybercrimes
laid out in the first section of the treaty or even actions unlawful under U.S. law.
So, regardless of any country's 'right to privacy' this says you have none.
There's no mention of encryption that I can find, though. Does that mean that if everything I do is encrypted then it cannot be recovered? Or that there is no encryption available because it would cause the search and recovery impossible?
This sounds like a really REALLY bad idea.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Yes! And by doing so they can circumvent ALL your constitutional rights, including the ever important First, Fourth and Fifth ammendments, because treaties have the same precedence as the supreme law of the land (Article VI.) Getting a treaty ratified is a hell of a lot easier than ammending the Constitution and can be effectively done without voter approval! Nice loophole guys!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?