The United States and the European Union recently published a draft version of an international cyber crime agreement with an interesting proviso — the less political freedom users have, the more privacy they will be granted. Conversely, the more political freedom users have, the less privacy the states of the world will cede them. Make sense to you? Me neither.
The proposed agreement is designed to allow police to easily track cyber criminals across national borders. Among other things the agreement would ban the mere possession of “hacking devices,” allow police from member countries access to computer data worldwide, and broaden that access to include close monitoring by Internet service providers which the agreement would now require of member countries.
Ironically, people living in an authoritarian state such as China would have far more privacy protection under this treaty than people living in relatively less authoritarian countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. This is based on the hypothesis that citizens of repressive governments need greater privacy protections than citizens of less repressive governments. Of course this completely reverses cause and effect — the reason countries like China are more repressive is precisely because they don’t constantly invent justification, as this treaty does, to abrogate the rights of their citizens for short term gains.
Besides which, although it is undeniable that European nations aren’t as repressive as China, they (along with the United States) are not perfect and do have backwards-looking laws as evidenced by recent demands from France that Yahoo! block auctions of Nazi memorabilia to citizens of that country. France is especially egregious, as people have been thrown into jail for denying that the Holocaust ever happened. While Holocaust deniers are absolutely wrong about their claims, and are in large measure motivated by racism rather than any genuine concern over historical accuracy, France like China is not above jailing people simply for the words they speak and write.
In both the United States and Great Britain, meanwhile, there is a long history of state law enforcement agencies being used to carry out political repression. Great Britain has often cut human rights corners in pursing IRA terrorists, while in the United States the state has often looked the other way at law enforcement violations of human rights in pursuit of left-wing and right-wing extremists, not to mention the prosecution of the drug war. In fact the United States has decided to emulate France by making it illegal to publish on the Internet instructions on making certain drug compounds.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Weisenthal Center, advised the Council of Europe on the treaty, and confirms by his words that the treaty will allow Western governments to go after web sites and individuals for what amounts to pure speech. According to Cooper, the treaty will allow prosecution of “violent” web sites. “We’re talking about web sites that teach people how to build bombs, claiming it’s for educational purposes.” I hate to burst Cooper’s bubble, but however noxious it might be, the right to publish instructions on how to make bombs — so long as such instructions are not accompanied by incitements to commit crimes — is protected by a long line of Constitutional law. In fact the First Amendment is so liberal in this area, that the U.S. government was unable to prevent a leftist magazine (The Progressive if I remember correctly), from publishing an article explicitly describing how to build a nuclear bomb — something that the United States asserted was a state secret.
Besides, does the world really need this treaty to pursue cyber criminals? Advocates of the agreement site numerous examples of criminals in one country using the Internet to commit crimes in other countries. But for the most part, international authorities had little problem identifying and punishing those troublemakers — usually extremely quickly. Look how fast, for example, the author of the “Love Bug” virus was identified last year. Most other high-profile Internet-related crimes have been solved without recourse to the sweeping police powers called for in the international cyber crime treaty.