zlacker

>>walter+(OP)
UN cybercrime treaty was unanimously approved by 200 countries this week.

>>walter+Wx
Well, that’s depressing. Were EFF recommendations applied?

>>acheon+AC
I don't think the EFF has much suction at the level of international diplomacy. Most UN countries, including much of Europe, don't have the basic categorical legal principles much of EFF's argumentation relies on, especially re: free expression and rules of evidence.

Fortunately, those same legal principles in the US cannot be overridden by a treaty.

>>tptace+sJ7
There has always been a fairly established group of NGOs with similar criticisms at the international level, including EFF (you're more likely to hear these critiques from EFF at HN because ... well, we're a pretty an EFF-adjacent community here.)

Unfortunately, the UN mostly works as a venue for governments negotiating with governments, with accredited NGOs having a position of being tolerated in those discussions, but with no real power. Outside of those tolerated NGOs, influence drops even further.

(When I was at EFF, we did try to get UN official accreditation, but China would consistently veto it. There are other digital rights groups that have been accepted though, and we worked very closely with those. The full list of NGOs are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_con... )

>>dannyo+8M7
Yeah, I was only struck by the previous comment's implication that the UN Office of Drugs and Crime might in the ordinary course take and act on feedback from the EFF. Like, it could happen, but it would be very surprising, right?

I think it almost doesn't make sense, in that I perceive EFF to be, whether overtly or not, a very American organization with very American public policy views.

>>tptace+vP7
I think the best way to think about this is that there are a number of human rights groups who collaborate on critiquing proposed treaties and other international proposals (at the UN, at WIPO, etc). The process tries to incorporate these critiques, as it does with other input (such as that from companies). While it's all real politik in the end, different states have different viewpoints and incentives, and having dedicated experts work with you to understand, criticise, and suggest language or positions is often useful.

In particular, a lot of global proposals come out of the US, especially around IP, so having a US organization say "this is what the US political situation is, this is how this has worked out in the US, and these are the lobbying groups pressuring the US to support this internationally", can be very useful.

I was EFF's international activist and later international director for a number of years. A lot of EFF's rhetoric is aimed at US lawmakers, and its primary USP for change, public impact litigation in the US courts, means that a lot of what you see is oriented toward American audiences and actions.

But behind the scenes, much more of the work than you'd imagine has a global side to it. This has been true since the days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, elements of which were rejected by the US Congress in the mid-Nineties, then policy-laundered through WIPO into the 1996 Copyright Treaty, which meant that it had to become law after the US Senate consented to it in 1999. (Treaties don't need the support of both houses in the US). EFF and other orgs at the time learned the lesson that regional and international agreements can often be an end-run around local democracy or norms -- and that local laws (from the DMCA to the GDPR) can have wider ramifications on a global network.