Cybercrime Treaty Signed

lam0r writes: "I can't find a newslink for this, but CNN had on their news ticker that 37 nations, including the United States, had signed a treaty designed to make tracking and prosecuting 'hackers' easier and more efficient. What exactly is defined as 'hacker' is something I haven't been able to find out. ... Why was the public not made aware of this until it was done? Anyone know more about this item than me?" This is the Cybercrime Treaty, which was signed today by 30 nations and which we have posted about before. This analysis is probably the best so far - it might be a little out of date since the treaty has been revised once or twice since it was written, but the basics are still the same.

Great

[Vegeta99]

So this one takes away constitutional rights, and gets around the protections - IIRC, treaties approved by legislature and the executive branch carry the same weight as the Constitution itself. Uhoh. This looks like it could be worse than the DMCA.

Although, perhaps, since it says singing states WILL create (it doesn't say that the treaty DOES) legislature banning these things, we might be OK.

Turning the world into a police state

[Jucius Maximus]

You can qualify almost anything as hacking if you stretch the words around enough. Therefore this could make the nations in question into places where everyone is in violation of some interpretation of the law.

This is what you call a police state. Anyone can be arrested at any time for any reason or no reason at all. Maybe I should move to the Middle East. Iraq didn't sign it.

The first thing...

[tsarina]

I don't care as much what's in the treaty. It could be that all nations must begin emptying their stockpiles of cute purple kittens for all I care. What the issue is, at least to me, is that we had little/no idea this was coming. Who's supposed to inform the public that our nation's signing crazy treaties? Most of the media's too busy with the Afghanistan operations...

Democracy is all about accountability. The reason democracy doesn't quite work is because that principle is not fulfilled. When the majority of the citizens don't know what their government is doing, then you get them signing strange purple kitten treaties. Or stuff like this. That is why it is that aspect of this treaty that I hold issue with.

Fear

[Ashcrow]

People fear what they don't understand. Security isn't something that the average user thinks about untill they lose a credit card or so.

Hackers have a bad reputation mainly because of the media, but Linus isn't evil, the creators of Slashdot are not evil, Alan Cox isn't evil, etc... and they are all hackers. Usually hacker is used for security coders/auditors but isn't just bound to that.

This kind of leads me to wonder if it isn't ok to hack (test your security, create security based aplications, etc...) but it is ok to crack.

question

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another one.

Honestly, are we more afraid of terrorists, or
our own governments?

George II says that Terrorists hate freedom, and want to take my freedom away. That isn't true.
Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.

Re:The first thing...

[More Trouble]

Democracy is all about accountability. The reason democracy doesn't quite work is because that principle is not fulfilled. When the majority of the citizens don't know what their government is doing, then you get them signing strange purple kitten treaties.

And with the majority of the press controlled by a handful of multi-national mega-corps, are you surprised that it doesn't work? Face it, it's much easier to make money when the gov'ment is your tool.

Ignorance of the Law is a symptom.

[3seas]

With such changes happening so quickly it becomes clear that part of
the responsibility of the law makers is to make these new laws known
to the people and in a form they can understand and even more important,
accept.

I don't want to have to read some damn encylopedia on human made
digital law in order to then try and figure out what I can and can't
do.

Computers are a versatile tool and it's bad enough that there are those
who don't want to solve the "software crisis", but to put more and more
constraints of what can and cannot be done is not going to help find
solutions to problems many claim they want to solve.

Seems to me that the growing conflict of interest is going to get worse
and as a result there will be a cyber war. A war between those who want
to put great constraint on who can do what vs. those who know better and
want to use computers to their fullest productive potential.

If being productive becomes illegal, then it'll be easy to see who the
real criminals are, and who outnumbers who. Atlas Shrugged.

"Cannot" based IP laws are going to have to be changed to "can" based
law that rewards those genuinely responsible for new and good things.

So what there is to do now is to start figuring out how to deal with this
growing conflict of interest that's building up to war levels, and the
governments most certainly know it.

Can't let them get away with creating laws that they can then interpret
how ever the hell they want to. Thus the requirement of them to clearly
define these laws in terms the general public can understand and to
publish them for the public to genuinely see.

Otherwise it's not ignorance of the law, but rather failure to inform on
the part of the law makers and their supporters. What could be construed
as entrapment.

To start with, all products that have some sort of builtin mechanism that
prevents such things as fair use, need to have a clear and obvious label
regarding such, otherwise it is bait and switch advertising deception. The
sort of thing that wrongly subverts knowledgeable consumer choice.

Last I looked, bait and switch is very illegal, and there is a consumer
choice reason for it. Hence, there should be no supprises by the music
industry in including copy protection, by having such copy protection
mentioned and clearly viewable on the label.

The laws being created don't appear to be very honest or fair, and in fact
may very well break some laws. So who really are the criminals?

Did those supporting Hitler see him as a criminal?

Maybe it's time for the OSS community to begin writing more realistic
laws. So that when the time comes, there will be something to replace the
laws made by criminals, with. Start thinking "CAN" based IP laws that reward
the creators of values, rather then some organization that supposedly represents
them! For in the digital world great effencies can be achieved by removing alot of
fat.
.
.

big surprise

[rambot]

Its just like politicians to do something bogus like this, using a situation like sept11 to put a pile of crap like this into legislation in the name of anti-terrorism. How many references to anti-terrorism are on the treaty? It's all about fairly vauge descriptions of what is to be considered a crime..primarily "hacking" of all kinds. Did I miss something here? What does hacking have to do with sept11? What does hacking have to do with terrorism from the middle east? YOU CAN'T ENFORCE THESE LAWS ON TERRORISTS!!! Just like this isn't a criminal issue..this is a 'war against terrorist/the evil do'ers'

This is all about.. ok, we need to stop terrorist hackers with stiff laws and punishments. These laws and punishments are not designed for our terrorist enemies, they are designed for our own citizens. Who is the enemy here??? It's pretty obvious that they didn't give a DAMN what the citizens of this so called democratic (i know...its really a republic) nation thought.

I love my country, but I fear my government. Now more than ever.

So contribute to EFF, already

[jonabbey]

By all means, write your congresspeople, but for god's sake send a check in to the EFF [eff.org] already, willya?

Talking about this stuff on slashdot is useless if that's as far as it goes. Scream and shout, get involved, etc., etc., etc.

Please?

Why won't the U.S. ratify this treaty? - $$$

[Bonker]

Sayeth the article:

That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop, or at least soften, the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.

IANAL, but I've been watching the progress of the Cybercrime treaty as it's evolved. I've never had very much fear of it being ratified precisely because of the above statement.

The same forces that most civil libretarians usually hate, ie... heavy corporate soft-money donations in order to influence laws that favor them, will actually work *for* those who care about seeing this treaty fall by the wayside.

It's very simple. If the treaty is ratified and the U.S. passes laws in order to uphold its obligations under the treaty, then the monetary cost to business such as the big telecom carriers like ATT and MCI-Worldcom, ISP's, biggie conglomerates such as AOL-TW, MSFT, and others will be very high. These costs will come from having to hire many, many extra individuals to perform the kind of monitoring and checking necessary, installing the hardware and software to make that monitoring possible, and a host of other, unforseen costs.

These companies will spend a lot of money on Congress in the short run in order to block this treaty's ratification... and the Bush administration will probably be very receptive as well. So far the Bush administration has heavily favored these businesses. Bill G. can attest to this. This same kind of thing has happened before... notably with the Kyoto accords. Don't think that it can't happen here just because of the pressure the DOJ is putting behind it.

Re:Directv???

[SealBeater]

If you don't know the specifics, then why are you commenting about it? For
your information, its perfectly legal in Canada to intercept DirecTV satallite
signals. If he resides in Canada and is percecuted under U.S. law, its the
same situation that Dimitri was jailed for writing software that was legal in
another country. Just because something is legal/illegal in another country,
no one should persecuted in their own country if its legal in theirs.

SealBeater