Concerns as US Senate Ratifies The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime

[Kristijntje]

The Senate has ratified a treaty under which the United States will join more than 40 other countries, mainly from Europe, in fighting crimes committed via the Internet.

The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, ratified late Thursday, is the first international treaty seeking to address Internet crimes by harmonizing national laws, improving investigative techniques and increasing cooperation among nations...

"While balancing civil liberty and privacy concerns, this treaty encourages the sharing of critical electronic evidence among foreign countries so that law enforcement can more effectively investigate and combat these crimes," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn...

full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...00479.html

The Convention had the backing of George Bush, but also of some industry groups like the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, composed of members like McAfee, RSA, Symantec, and F-Secure. But it aroused the ire of civil liberties groups on the left and the right, including the ACLU and the EFF (which called it one of the "World's Worst Internet Laws").

According to the EFF, "The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries' 'cybercrime' laws—even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdictions' requests to log their users' behavior without due process, or compensation."...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060804-7421.html

[mandy]

A related article:

in August the Senate ratified the Convention on Cybercrime, drafted by the Council of Europe with considerable input from the United States. So far, 43 nations have signed on. The Convention includes many sensible provisions aimed at unifying global computer-crime laws, and closes loopholes that make it possible for criminals to escape prosecution by locating their activities offshore.

But civil libertarians, along with leading telecommunications companies, strongly oppose the treaty. 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. If France is investigating a sale of Nazi memorabilia on eBay, the U.S. must cooperate, even though such transactions are not illegal in the U.S.

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...

full article: http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,154...030607EOAD