The Wrong Cybercrime Treaty
Cybercrime–ranging from identity theft and one-off scams to attacks on major institutions–has become a major threat to the safety and privacy of internet users around the world. But a new treaty that purports to address the issue could do more harm than good.
A UN committee has been engaged in drafting a potential cybercrime treaty since the process was proposed by the Russian government in 2017. The group, with an impressively long title – the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes – has held rounds of meetings to hash out details of what an international agreement on cybercrime would look like.
CDT is an accredited stakeholder participant in the negotiations and as early as 2021 we raised alarm bells about its scope.
As further explained in a more recent open letter to the committee from civil society organizations, the current proposed treaty could allow governments to collect massive amounts of personal data from internet users, even across national borders, without their knowledge or consent. It could also threaten the work of network security researchers whose efforts help to identify and close vulnerabilities in systems that bad actors can exploit.
The level of data collection allowed under this treaty could also be used to suppress dissent, and the paltry safeguards text notably doesn’t mention the protection of political opinion because some states have sought to keep that protection out of the negotiated language. As the open letter notes, the possibility that governments could collect the data will itself have a chilling effect, since citizens will often censor themselves if they think Big Brother is watching.
It’s critical to make progress against cybercrime, but we know that any successful cybersecurity treaty will need to be built on a firm foundation of human rights, including the right to privacy and freedom of expression and opinion. As it stands now, this treaty would almost certainly make a bad situation worse. We as a planet of internet users deserve better.
