Imagine a law, originally crafted to fight global hacking and virus writing, but would also allow the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iranians to employ the FBI to muzzle dissidents and dissenters who employ websites in the US anonymously to speak out. Imagine a law that would allow foreign countries to use American law enforcement to uncover the identities of citizens in the US who are critical of their policies. Pure hypothetical bullshit you say?
No, it's not: The Convention on Cybercrime is a treaty that would allow other countries, most of which have many more restrictions placed on freedom of speech, to force American law enforcement to act against people who violate another country's laws. Consider, for example, someone who's family still lives in Cuba, but they live in the US and are vocal online against Castro. This law would permit the Cubans to get the identity of the person speaking in the US and commit reprisals against the person's family. Consider people in China who use the internet to get unfiltered information and to spread unfiltered information to the rest of the world. The Chinese government could use this law to find those people and jail them.
And in both cases, the FBI would be helping.
I find this repugnant and terrible, and I'm abhorred that our president would be advocating this bill. There is a provision in the treaty that would allow countries to refuse to enforce a law unless it was a crime in both countries (called dual criminality), which is fine, because it would then only pertain to things like real crimes.
The text of the bill can be found here: http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/185.htm
Leave a comment