A committee on crimes for the Council of Europe signed off Friday on the final draft of a broad treaty that aims to help countries fight cybercrime, but which critics say sacrifices privacy protections.
When ratified by the council's leadership and signed by individual countries, the Convention on Cyber-Crime will bind countries to creating a minimum set of laws to deal with high-tech crimes, including unauthorized access to a network, data interference, computer-related fraud and forgery, child pornography, and digital copyright infringement. |
The convention--which reached its 27th draft before being approved--also has provisions that will ensure surveillance powers for governments and bind nations to helping each other gather evidence and enforce laws.
However, the new international powers will come at the expense of protections for citizens against government abuse, said James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the tech-policy think tank Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.
"The treaty's framers started in the wrong place," he said. "For the first nineteen drafts, they kept it essentially a law-enforcement treaty. Only in the end did the privacy issues get attention, and they never got the attention they deserved."
The Council of Europe--founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg, France--groups together 43 European countries. If the Convention on Cyber-Crime is approved, the United States--along with others that have observer status within the Council (Japan, Canada, Mexico and the Vatican)--will be allowed to sign on.
The treaty "addresses an important problem: the difficulties law enforcement has in pursing criminals across national borders, something that is common in Internet crime," said Patricia Bellia, assistant professor at Notre Dame Law School.
Source: Coe.int
