Member States traded away existing human rights safeguards to reach a contrived consensus for a treaty that will endanger journalists, dissenters, human rights activists, and every day people around the world.
Why is it back on the front page and posted "5 hours ago"? I'm not implying underhandedness or anything but I'd like to know why this happens. Anyone know?
These are the comments it got at the time:
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... )
That is a fairly bad take tbh.
I mentioned this in my previous comment about this treaty, and the primary driver is the fact that most countries (especially China, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, India) are NOT parties of the Budapest Convention because of the Censorship or Surveillance portions.
Now that offensive security capabilities have proliferated, some amount of norms are required (which is what Article 12, 13 and 17 touch on), but the countries listed above will not budge on their censorship or surveillance stance.
This treaty is itself is a result of the Track 1.5 Dialogues around cyberwarfare happening between the 5 Eyes and China [1][2] after tensions became dangerously bad in the early 2020s.
If letting China continue their Great Firewall means we can formalize the rules of engagement for gray-zone operations using a third party (Appin/India, LockBit/Russia, ChamelGang/China or NK), so be it.
The UN treaty is superseded by American jurisdiction anyhow.
> future of a free internet
The internet was never truly free. Access was always arbitrated by telcos (and a major reason why the tech industry has been a major donor to the EFF) who themselves are strongly regulated by governments.
The difference is, the internet isn't only a Western project anymore, and consensus will need to be formed with other nations, unless we want to end up forming regionalized "internets"
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210110#41211961
[1] - https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/our-departments/intern...
[2] - https://www.idcpc.org.cn/english2023/bzhd/202406/t20240618_1...
>HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off.
[0] https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/v24/055/06/pdf/v24055...
Data Collection was one of the primary reason why Russia, China, India, Singapore, and other nations did not become parties to the Budapest Convention (the precursor to this treaty) [0][1]
Most nations other than the US, Canada, EU, and Japan mandate collection and retention of metadata by ISPs and Online Services, and this was a major sticking point that lead to the inefficacy of the Budapest Convention.
> Those two articles are unrelated to your points here
I just gave links to the currently ongoing Track 1.5 dialogues to show the ongoing diplomacy work that has started over cybercrime in the early 2020s.
[0] - https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%20In...
[1] - https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/InternationalCyberNorms_C...
EFF and partner groups often contribute to government and international proposals (a hundred-or-so of them have been involved in the cybercrime treaty process for many years https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/joint-statement-propos... and I believe got it to a fairly good place before a last-minute push by some states to introduce more surveillance into it.)
You don't really get to hear about the compromises, because you don't really need to kick up a fuss about something that has worked out okay -- and even if you do post about the positive fine print, nobody sends such exciting documents to the front page of Hacker News.
When I was at EFF, we did try to get UN official accreditation, but China would consistently veto it.. I was EFF's international activist and later international director for a number of years.. more of the work than you'd imagine has a global side to it. This has been true since the days of [DMCA].. 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..
EFF and partner groups often contribute to government and international proposals (a hundred-or-so of them have been involved in the cybercrime treaty process for many years [1] and I believe got it to a fairly good place before a last-minute push by some states to introduce more surveillance into it.)
Earlier HN threads:
UN Cybercrime Convention To Overrule Bank Secrecy, 40 comments, >>41221403
UN cybercrime treaty unanimously approved, 50 comments, >>41210110
Critique by 20 NGOs: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/joint-statement-propos...
Further analysis needed.
> even if you do post about the positive fine print, nobody sends such exciting documents to the front page of Hacker News.
Reviewed by humans: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
> The enforceability of treaties was further limited in the 2008 Supreme Court decision in Medellín v. Texas, which held that even if a treaty may constitute an international commitment, it is not binding domestic law unless it has been implemented by an act of Congress or is itself explicitly "self-executing".[26] Law scholars called the ruling "an invisible constitutional change" that departed from both longtime historical practice and the plain language of the Supremacy Clause.[27]
I can tell you that government surveillance of private communication has at least been a widespread concern for thousands of years. See for example: https://classicalstudies.org/imperial-spies-and-intercepted-....
Many countries have centuries-old constitutional guarantees of the right to secrecy of correspondence: https://www.marottaonmoney.com/right-to-privacy-of-correspon....