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.