The United Nations approved its first international cybercrime treaty yesterday. The effort succeeded despite opposition from tech companies and human rights groups, who warn that the agreement will permit countries to expand invasive electronic surveillance in the name of criminal investigations. Experts from these organizations say that the treaty undermines the global human rights of freedom of speech and expression because it contains clauses that countries could interpret to internationally prosecute any perceived crime that takes place on a computer system.
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among the watchdog groups that monitored the meeting closely, the tone was funereal. “The U.N. cybercrime convention is a blank check for surveillance abuses,” says Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) policy director for global privacy. “It can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations.”
In the coming weeks, the treaty will head to a vote among the General Assembly’s 193 member states. If it’s accepted by a majority there, the treaty will move to the ratification process, in which individual country governments must sign on.
The treaty, called the Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, was first devised in 2019, with debates to determine its substance beginning in 2021. It is intended to provide a global legal framework to prevent and respond to cybercrimes.
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experts have expressed that the newly adopted treaty lacks such safeguards for a free Internet. A major concern is that the treaty could be applied to all crimes as long as they involve information and communication technology (ICT) systems. HRW has documented the prosecution of LGBTQ+ people and others who expressed themselves online. This treaty could require countries’ governments to cooperate with other nations that have outlawed LGBTQ+ conduct or digital forms of political protest, for instance.
“This expansive definition effectively means that when governments pass domestic laws that criminalize a broad range of conducts, if it’s committed through an ICT system, they can point to this treaty to justify the enforcement of repressive laws,” said HRW executive director Tirana Hassan in a news briefing late last month.
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“The treaty allows for cross-border surveillance and cooperation to gather evidence for serious crimes, effectively transforming it into a global surveillance network,” Rodriguez says. “This poses a significant risk of cross-border human rights abuses and transnational repression.”
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Source: New U.N. Cybercrime Treaty Could Threaten Human Rights | Scientific American
For a more complete look at the threats presented by this treaty, also see: UN Cybercrime Treaty does not define cybercrime, allows any definition and forces all signatories to secretly surveil their own population on request by any other signatory (think totalitarian states spying on people in democracies with no recourse)
Robin Edgar
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