Cybercrime Treaty to Be Signed

texchanchan writes: "Yahoo reports that "Interior ministers and law enforcement officials from Europe, South Africa, Canada, the United States and Japan will sign the milestone cyber-crime convention.... [because] computer criminals... have moved on from ``innocent'' hacking to fraud, embezzlement and life-threatening felonies."" Feel the spin in that article, from the anonymous "official". We've posted about this treaty before; read the final draft and note it well, particularly the extradition provisions, mutual assistance (some other country gets your country to tap your phones, and send them the data) and the requirements to disclose passwords.

Comments

It is important to note . . .

[taustin]

. . . that under the provisions of the United States Constitution, "Interior ministers and law enforcement officials" can sign whatever the hell they want, but only the US Senate can actually approve a treaty with another nation. And until they do, it's not law.

Also note that treaties cannot alter the Constitution itself, nor can they implement anything that violates it.

Re:It is important to note . . .

[praedor]

This doesn't negate the original statement. Only Congress can OK a treaty. Until they do, signing the paper means nothing (see the treaty on Global Warming, signed but essentially dead in the US because it hasn't gotten past Congress).

Without amending/revoking Constitutional Amendments, the treaty STILL cannot override the Bill of Rights, period. The ONLY way to beat something in the Bill of Rights and all Amendments attached to it is via another Amendment.

In come the landsharks^WLawyers

[Darth RadaR]

I don't like where this is going.

Article 11 - Attempt and aiding or abetting

1. Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, aiding or abetting the commission of any of the offences established in accordance with Articles 2 - 10 of the present Convention with intent that such offence be committed.

Great. Now software developers that make things like Nmap, tcpdump, portscanner, sniffit, and other security tools will get jailed or fined out of existence and charged with "aiding and abetting" just because J. Random Cracker ran their software to 0\/\/3n3d someone's unsecured box. You just *know* some lawyer can't wait to make a bunch of money^W^W^W^W^Wuse this little bit of legislation to put people behind bars.

Pilots can easilly turn them back on

[FreeUser]

Someone switches off the landing lights via the computer systems.

As a pilot who has experienced this sort of thing (through other causes) I can say with certainty that any competent pilot can either switch the runway lights back on or go missed (or both if their not comfortable with the situation). Most airports, even the large ones, have pilot controlled lighting (key the mike n times on the CTAF/Tower Frequency). If the pilot is already in the flair then s/he can already see the runway with the plane's landing/taxi lights, and unless visibility is really, really bad (in which case they can go missed) they can land at that point without the runway lights being on at all.

If there really aren't options (like a blackout due to thunderstorm, terrorist bomb, or luser system cracker), then the pilot can do a missed approach and enter a holding pattern (if on instruments) until the situation is resolved or s/he is diverted to another airport, or if flying VFR simply go around and either try the approach again or find an alternate airport. Even in the worst case scenerio turning off the runway lights, even on short final, is hardly life threatening. Hell, its happened to me simply because the lights had been turned on 15 minutes earlier by another landing pilot and the timer shut the lights off with the threshold about fifty feet away from my descending aircraft. Seven quick clicks on the mike and I completed the landing without even a raise in pulse. This sort of thing happens all the time in non-computerized systems, and I will repeat again, it is not life threatening. Adding a computer to the situation doesn't change that, in the least.

Re:Whoa. Paranoia runs deeper than i thought.

[Legion303]

The law makes it mandatory to reveal any encryption keys you have. Failure to do so can result in fine/imprisonment etc.

This is where Rubberhose comes in. Never thought I'd need it in America....

-Legion

References

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I shouldn't call bullshit without doing my research first, but interestingly, this story has some details:

In March [1999], Department of Justice computer crime chief Scott Charney regaled a gathering of bankers with the story of a 1997 hacker who crashed a telephone switch, resulting in the landing lights at a Massachusetts airport going black.

Regular readers of this column will recall my conversation with the airport administrator, who assured me that his runway lights never even flickered.

Another report adds :

This incident was benign
But authorities said the outage had in fact caused no danger and little or no disruption at the airport, which sees a half-dozen flights a day.

"I don't have any reason to believe ... that there was danger on March 10th to anyone," said Stephen P. Heymann, deputy chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Massachusetts, who is the head prosecutor on the case. "But that doesn't mean that if the same thing hadn't happened at night when planes were taking off and landing, that the danger wouldn't have been present. If it had happened at night, we could be looking at something very different by way of a story here."

In other words, the landing lights were not turned out, not least because it happened during the day. The Euro official's statement may not be complete bullshit as I claimed, but it's misleading at least. According to this piece on media hacking, the story is false. Yet this government site repeats the story and even claims that planes were diverted.

Whatever the truth of what really happened, there's clearly large dollops of myth in with the facts and it's no wonder my bullshit detector went off...

Re:"...life-threatening felonies?"

[the eric conspiracy]

Can someone please give me an example of *ONE* "life-threatening [felony]"

Here is one..

In 1997 a Massachusetts teenager broke into and disabled telecommunications at Worchester airport, disabling the control tower for 6 hours.

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/juvenil ep ld.htm

I am sure there others.

Re:Autoimmune Disease

[nosferatu1001]

We had our [british] civil war back i n1642, which instituted democracy pretty much firmly, taxes to government not the monarch etcetera

only 130 years before you claim you invented it!

bad luck old chap....

And we brought democracy to more countries than america ever did. but i like your open source comment!