Cybercrime Treaty Pushes Surveillance Worldwide

bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime — is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Leaving out constitutional safeguards, gag orders in place of oversight, and forcing service providers to retain your data may all be coming soon."

Comments

Encrypt everything.

[Caerdwyn]

There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.

Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.

That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.

Re:Encrypt everything.

[easyTree]

It's lucky they took the time to run lots of false flag operations in the name of LulzSec and Anon. - otherwise the public might be forgiven for thinking that the levels of cyber-crime didn't warrant a global government-organised snooping-operation.

Good show.

Re:Encrypt everything.

[Riceballsan]

True, but even that is inevitably doomed in the long run, Either governments will issue much stronger supercomputers to break all encryption available to normal citizens, or they will be pushing laws to outlaw use of encryption stronger then a certain point without a license and a specific reason (IE you can use encryption while dealing with credit card transactions, but not to e-mail your friend. Don't think you can simply use technology to make yourself invincible, Either they can beat it, or they can outlaw it.

Re:Encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.

This is wise. And I appreciate that you showed that all sides of the political spectrum act the same if they get too much power. More Americans need to realize this.

Re:Encrypt everything.

[TheCarp]

Um.... extensions other than Subject Alternative Name? Because, that has worked fine for a few years now (in browsers, and a few other places anyway).

With a SAN the certificate just simply lists ALL vhosts that it supports. So, while an eavesdropper can see what site you are going to, he can only see it as one of the several sites that you might possibly be going to.

Of course, Verisign makes sure to ass rape you solidly if you want SANs, but that is almost redundant since, they always try to provide that service.

-Steve

Re:Answer = Proxy Server

[mlts]

Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.

Re:Answer = Proxy Server

[causality]

Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.

Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next ... that's not the same thing as fighting back.

The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.

Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.

Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.

Re:Socialists and/or Fascists

[BrianMarshall]

Actually, I feel that Canada is a pretty scary place as well.

The US is scary, but at least it has a real Constituion. This constituion is being ignored in many cases, but at least some people care about this.

Canada is currently less scary than the US, particularly if you are a Canadian citizen. But I live in a city with a zillion cameras, which I hate. What I hate even more (and what scares me even more) is that the cameras went up and no one seems to care. I don't know how much debate there was about them, but Canada has very little except tradition to prevent it from turning into a police state.