Chronic Shyness Turns Brits Into Big Online Banking Supporters

Add Bad Internet Legislation To List Of US Imports

from the made-in-somewhere-else dept

Fri, Aug 4th 2006 4:37pm — Carlo Longino

Having apparently decided that homegrown internet legislation isn't sufficiently bad, the Senate has approved the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, which essentially establishes rules and a framework for international cooperation on cybercrime investigation and harmonizes computer crime laws. US laws already contain many of the convention's stipulations, but one significant change is that it forces law enforcement groups and businesses of one country to cooperate with foreign governments without the requirement of "dual criminality" -- meaning that they're obliged to help foreign law enforcement investigate crimes even if the targets of the investigation have broken no laws in their country. For instance, the FBI must now help, say, French security services investigate internet crimes that happen there, while those French services must comply with US requests to do things such as wiretap a network there in regards to a crime committed in the US. Given the ongoing controversy regarding the US governments' wiretapping here in its own country, it seems more than a little problematic to give it carte blanche to force foreign governments to help it carry out similar activities overseas, while offering those countries the same privileges here. While it's certain that cybercrime is an international problem, and criminals like child pornographers and hackers act with little regard for geographic borders, simply throwing things open so widely seems more likely to drastically raise the possibility of abuse of civil liberties and skirting of laws than do anything tangible to stop crime.

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13 Comments

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Anon, 4 Aug 2006 @ 6:45pm

Internet Laws
This is the sort of thing that happens when a group of people are sat down in one place and told to make laws. The more rules the government makes, the more they restrict their own lawful allturnatives not those of people who may not be concerned about ethics. If there were no laws saying when the gov. may tap communications then they could tap any communication. Laws do not restrict the criminal only the law enforcers.
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Kyros, 5 Aug 2006 @ 12:18am

...
They'll eventually figure it out when in 20 years all they have is bad media and little to nothing to show for it. That or they'll keep pouring money and resources into attempting to make it work, and thus drive us as well as other countries into bankruptcy.
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Dosquatch, 5 Aug 2006 @ 5:47am

the real violation to come
I see a complete undermining of civil liberties and due process coming. All it takes to skirt the courts is for some agency to request a "request for cooperation" from a foreign counterpart to make a legal jacket for any investigation that might otherwise be "too hard" to conduct.
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Daryl Licked, 5 Aug 2006 @ 6:54am

the real viewpoint
this is a liberal idea that is being blamed on conservative politics. for petes sake, the government is not my damn mom. when you try to control people, you dont have a government, you have a prison.
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jd bumm, 5 Aug 2006 @ 10:48am

Re: the real viewpoint
As allways someone has to bring out the labels ie: consevative or Liberal...

bad laws are not the property of any political party...

it just seems like we get more of it (badly crafted laws) under the guise of ''the good of the public''..when in fact the only ones who do well are the lawyers who suck up billions of dollars sorting thru the mess left buy the ill crafted ''regulations and laws"
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ngd, 5 Aug 2006 @ 11:14am

This is only for cybercrimes, so I'm so convinced that it has much to do with what the NSA is up to. However, this changes the way you should think about that anti-internet gambling bill. This means that the US then could shut down any site in the world that allos online gambling and other countries are forced to assist even if they legalize it. Same goes for filing sharing. This is where the outcry should revolve: now the most oppressive and backward laws can rely on a treaty to assert themselves worldwide.
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FerroMancer, 5 Aug 2006 @ 2:10pm

Internet Laws
I can understand the idea here; that in a (cyber)world without national boundaries, we need the help of the authorities in whichever country the perpetrator operates to assist with resolving the crime. However, it DOES open up the whole can of worms regarding laws that don't run parallel between two countries.

Alot of work (and alot of taxpayer dollars) will have to be invested to make this fair and viable.
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Mike J, 5 Aug 2006 @ 3:01pm

laws
if you think about it, if most of the child porn is hosted in the US we may just be forced by the french to procecute our own criminals in some twisted international case. I have started to care less and less what happens in the world. I must be getting old, or I just think that people will be people no matter what laws there are or what tools available to them there will always be some shithead hackor that thinks he's l337 because he can read your hardrive from 3000 miles. Its not a secrete its easy to do, you are not l337 and now you can be procecuted from any country in the world and I think It might be a good thing. I've been wrong before.
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Aceboonkk, 5 Aug 2006 @ 6:38pm

Yeah but....
The problem is that the law breakers aren't here... or there... they're in Costa Rica or some other country that really couldn't care less about our laws...

What about wireless accesss... somebodies tapping into your wireless network right now..
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Dave Goober, 5 Aug 2006 @ 9:29pm

Watch out for the French
In France it is illeagal to sell Nazi related materials. In the US it is our right to do so. Of course, anything Nazi is in poor taste period, but Imagine French officials bleeding the FBI dry running all over the US looking for the E-bayer who had his Sale listed as will ship International!
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no name, 6 Aug 2006 @ 4:41am

age of consent
in spain you can have sex with a 14 year old girl, in france 15....somehow this probably applies here somewhere, you geniuses can figure it out, its good info none the less...
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just me, 6 Aug 2006 @ 7:46pm

I just wish the ones making the laws understood the what, when, where, why, and how of the law they are creating. Most of the ones creating these laws, don't understand enough about how the Internet works, how software works, etc. Give a job to a fool, and the fool will make a fool out of you and your business.
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random dude, 6 Aug 2006 @ 8:13pm

Whatever
Yin and Yang! What if a "request for cooperation" is denied? (which the united states will most definitely do because we are too hard at work gettin them dang ol darn terrorists haha) It is a REQUEST afterall not a demand (although USA will treat thier cases as a demand).

This whole law making thing is pissing me off... The point of a law shouldn't be to restrict our daily lives but to protect us from our own government. Besides I have no say what so ever in the lawmaking process (unless I went to college for say another 4 to 5 years for the sole purpose of making restrictions on others lives. CRAZY!)
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