Slashdot Mirror
Cybercrime Treaty — Hidden Costs For All
linuxtelephony writes in with an article at CIO Insight about a cybercrime treaty drafted in Europe with help from the US. It has implications for just about everyone with a network. From the article: "Civil libertarians are especially concerned about the sweeping authority given to participating countries to seize information from private parties as they investigate cybercrimes, even when the activity being investigated isn't a crime in the country where the data is located... Telecommunications companies object to provisions that require member countries to establish and enforce potent data-retention policies for network traffic, and require any operator of a computer network to respond to requests for information from any participating country without compensation of any kind... The provisions for data retention and production apply to any operator of a computer network, not just telecoms... Worldwide law-enforcement agencies, in other words, may now avail themselves of the opportunity to outsource their most expensive problems to you."
This is the reason we should make it as hard for them as possible to tell what's being sent.
As long as the vast majority of connections are plaintext, it will be easy for the snoop-happy authorities to compress traffic down to the most important portions (URLs, text of IMs rather than protocol overhead, etc.) then log them permanently.
If we encrypt everything, it will simply become infeasible to perform long-term dragnet surveillance of innocent people. When someone is suspected of a crime, police will need to investigate that specific person, rather than assume everyone alive is a criminal. If you work in a position where you have influence, where you can make programming and protocol design decisions, hopefully you'll take this into account and help stop the surveillance state before it encompasses everything.
We need universal encryption for no less noble purpose than the preservation of any semblance of justice in society.