Security News > 2023 > April > Russia-pushed UN Cybercrime Treaty may rewrite global law. It's ... not great

The UN Cybercrime Treaty, to the extent it gets adopted, is expected to define global norms for lawful surveillance and legal processes available to investigate and prosecute cybercriminals.

What concerns Rodriguez and other representatives of advocacy groups at the briefing is that the treaty negotiators will compromise on surveillance, privacy, and human rights.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and global cybersecurity lead for Access Now, a US-based digital rights group, said that the goal of a cybercrime treaty should be to make people more secure, but the current draft proposal does the opposite by failing to make affordances for good-faith security security research.

"We had hoped that the cybercrime treaty process would seek clear language that protects these researchers by making it obligatory on states to put very heightened requirements for intent to say that it's not just intrusion into a network, but that it is specific intrusion with malicious intent or with intent to do harm that should be there," he said.

Last August, retired Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, US lead negotiator for the UN Cybercrime Treaty, made clear that the US wants the treaty to acknowledge human rights obligations.

A US State Department spokesperson told The Register in an email, "The United States believes the Ad Hoc Committee is on a path towards a consensus-based treaty that will help countries fight the scourge of cybercrime. We are working with a broad variety of Member States and aim to have a narrow criminal justice treaty that increases international cooperation, protects human rights and supports multi-stakeholder engagement."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/14/un_cybercrime_treaty/