US Declines to Sign UN Cybercrime Treaty

This is not over until it is over. The cybercrime treaty forces signers to potentially break their own laws and criminalize actions that are legal in their own country if a foreign government asks them to.

It requires governments to hand over data about their citizens such as, and certainly not limited to, a citizen’s emails with no ability to decline.

The tech industry has been trying to explain to the State Department how bad this will be for US citizens if, for example, China, who did sign the treaty, demands Microsoft or Google to hand over a US citizen’s email, say, for example, the email of Donald J Trump, with no ability to stop it. It would also allow Russia to force the extradition of US security researchers to Russia to face charges of hacking if Russia wants to.

The problem the US was facing was that over the last five years that this treaty has been in the works, the US has been supportive of it, so it might embarrass the diplomats if they voted against it now.

However, the political optics of say, China or Venezuela demanding that we turn over information or people to them to prosecute is probably worse than getting embarrassed for not signing it.

More than 70 countries signed the agreement last week in Hanoi which means that more than 100 did not, likely for similar reasons.

Interestingly, the UK (which has the Snooper’s Charter) and the EU (which claims that citizens have a fundamental right to privacy) did sign it. So much for EU privacy.

All signers still have to create national laws to implement the thing that they signed.

Part of the problem with the treaty is the language, much of which was put forth by countries like China. The language is even more weasel-worded than most US laws. For example, it requires compliance if someone (a citizen of the target country) is accused of a serious crime, which is defined as a crime, the conviction of which, is punishable by a sentence of at least 4 years in the country that is asking for the data. That means if China wants to get information or cooperation from the US to arrest and prosecute a US citizen, all they need to do is, in the dark of night, pass a law that penalizes that action by a sentence of more than four years.

The UN says that they expect signers to respect human rights. Sure. And I am the King of England.

It also requires signers to create a nationwide surveillance regime, which countries like the UK support – it already has more than 20 million surveillance cameras and more cameras than any other country except China.

Still, the US says it is “looking at it”, meaning they still could sign the treaty. Even if they did, the Senate would need to ratify it and then Congress would need to pass laws to implement it. That might not be terribly popular with Republican voters concerns about government overreach in an election year.

Credit: The Record

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