This week, the United Nations convened member states to proceed its years-long negotiations on the UN Cybercrime Treaty, titled “Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes.”
As extra elements of our lives intersect with the digital sphere, legislation enforcement around the globe has more and more turned to digital proof to research and disrupt legal exercise. Google takes the specter of cybercrime very severely, and dedicates important assets to combating it. When governments ship Google authorized orders to reveal person knowledge in reference to their investigations, we fastidiously evaluation these orders to verify they fulfill relevant legal guidelines, worldwide norms, and Google’s insurance policies. We additionally usually report the variety of these orders in our Transparency Report.
To make sure that transnational authorized calls for are issued according to rule of legislation, we now have lengthy known as for an worldwide framework for digital proof that features sturdy due course of protections, respects human rights (together with the fitting to free expression), and aligns with present worldwide norms. This is especially essential within the case of transnational legal investigations, the place the authorized protections in a single jurisdiction might not align with these in others.
Such safeguards aren’t simply essential to making sure free expression and human rights, they’re additionally essential to defending net safety. Too usually, as we all know properly from serving to get up the Security Researcher Legal Defense Fund, people working to advance cybersecurity for the general public good find yourself dealing with legal expenses. The Cybercrime Treaty shouldn’t criminalize the work of reputable cybersecurity researchers and penetration testers, which is designed to guard particular person techniques and the online as an entire.
UN Member States have a chance to strengthen world cybersecurity by adopting a treaty that encourages the criminalization of essentially the most egregious and systemic actions — on which all events can agree — whereas adopting a framework for sharing digital proof that’s clear, grounded within the rule of legislation, based mostly on pre-existing worldwide frameworks just like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and aligned with ideas of necessity and proportionality. At the identical time, Member States ought to keep away from makes an attempt to criminalize actions that increase important freedom of expression points, or that really undercut the treaty’s aim of decreasing cybercrime. That would require strengthening essential guardrails and protections.
We urge Member States to heed calls from civil society teams to handle essential gaps within the Treaty and revise the textual content to guard customers and safety professionals — not endanger the safety of the online.