Cisco Wants United Nations To Revisit Cyber Crime Convention Report

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Networking giant Cisco has suggested the United Nations' first-ever convention against cyber crime is dangerously flawed and should be revised before being put to a formal vote.

The document that Cisco dislikes is the United Nations convention against cyber crime [PDF]. The convention took five years to create and was drafted by a body called the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes.^*

The purpose of the Convention is to "enhance international cooperation, law enforcement efforts, technical assistance, and capacity-building relating to cyber crime," in recognition that digital technology has become a big enabler of transnational mischief.

As The Register theregister.com reported after the Committee agreed on a draft text, Russia was a big driver of the document, and human rights groups don't like it.

Human Rights Watch, for example, criticized the Convention as overly broad, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation has labelled the Convention "too flawed to adopt."

Those two orgs, and others, worry that the Convention doesn't offer a narrow definition of cyber crime, and could give signatory nations legal cover to target citizens who share views they dislike. They also worry about secrecy provisions in the document that would allow nations to demand info from service providers, without the individuals targeted by such requests being informed or having recourse.

British human rights org Article 19 has also warned the Convention's broad language could stymie legitimate infosec research, by creating a legal environment in which cyber-boffins don't feel safe to ply their trade for fear of being labelled crims.

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