Final draft Euro cybercrime pact sparks criticism

If adopted, the European Commission's Convention on Cybercrime, which is
supported by the Council of Europe, would increase the data retention
responsibilities of network operators and service providers. Police would
be able to demand telecommunications data, including emails and internet
usage, for up to seven years. The treaty requires domestic companies to
comply with foreign investigators, even when they are investigating
activities that are not crimes on domestic soil. Corporations would be held
liable for the online activities of their employees, whether or not they
were aware of them, which means that corporations will have to increase
monitoring of employees. Additionally, businesses would have to bear the
cost of storing and producing the computer data for law enforcement.

In response, several GILC member organizations, including Privacy
International, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American
Civil Liberties Union, submitted a letter "to voice ... continuing
concerns regarding the development and form" of the treaty. Among other
things, the authors of the letter argued that the portions of the treaty
meant to protect user privacy were "vague" and otherwise "not adequate to
address the significant demands and requirements for privacy- invasive
techniques in the rest of the Convention." The letter's creators also
pointed out how the Cybercrime agreement would apparently erode user
privacy, with provisions that seem to require "that countries adopt laws
that can force users to provide their encryption keys and the plain text
of the encrypted files," as well as "[a]llowing law enforcement direct
access to a service provider's network to conduct surveillance, e.g., the
U.S. Carnivore program," thus providing "police with the ability to
conduct broad sweeps of network communications with only their
unsupervised assurance that they will only collect that data which they
are lawfully entitled to collect." Additional concerns were voiced
regarding the treaty's mandatory requirements that signatory nations
cooperate with surveillance requests from other countries, even if a
targeted individual is acting legally in one of those countries.

Meanwhile, Internet pioneer and WorldCom vice president Vint Cerf has also
expressed reservations about the Cybercrime treaty, saying that the
document "has provisions which are in conflict with other already agreed
(EU) privacy laws." He was especially concerned with the agreement's data
retention requirements:" With many terabytes of data moving over the Net
every day, accumulating any small fraction of that for any lengthy amount
of time such as months or years is a very, very hard thing to ask." Even
the European Union's own chief privacy commissioner, Stefano Rodota,
charged that the agreement "still includes significant gaps concerning the
protection and liberties of the citizen."

The joint letter by EPIC, the ACLU and Privacy International is posted
under
http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/cybercrime/coe/ngo_letter_60…

Read Boris Grondahl, "Europe: Net Crime-Stoppers," Industry Standard, July
2, 2001 issue, at
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27400,00.html?printer_friendl…

See Robert Lemos, "Multi-nation cybercrime pact gets OK," ZDNet News, June
22, 2001 at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093153,00.html

For German (Deutsch) language coverage, read Stefan Krempl,
"Cybercrime-Abkommen passiert eine der letzen Hurden," Heise Telepolis,
June 23, 2001 at http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/7951/1.html

For more of Cerf's remarks, read "Internet founder worried about EU
cybercrime plans," Reuters, May 31, 2001 at
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2767085,00.html

Version 27 of the Council of Europe cybercrime treaty is available (in Word
format) under http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/EN/projets/cybercrime27.doc

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