Viet-Justice

For god’s sake people, it’s for the children! We have to catch internet pedophiles to protect the children! How many times have you heard that to justify the loss of freedom? Well folks, it has happened again. The Senate has ratified the Convention on Cybercrime and flushed our privacy down the toilet. This treaty forces the US to cooperate with foreign law enforcement in cases where the law is broken in a foreign country. In short this means the FBI can now spy on you without a warrant if you do something on the Internet that some foreign government doesn’t like.

Are you a Chinese person critical of China’s government? You had better not go on vacation to China because you may be on a watch list when you arrive. Germany has been doing this for over a decade with Neo-Nazis. If you’re a US citizen and you have swastikas on your US hosted web site you will in all likelihood be arrested if you get off the plane in Germany. Yes, you will probably find yourself on a watch list and be placed in jail because someone in Germany can see your swastikas never mind the 1st Amendment legally allows you to express yourself
Don’t think this applies to Nazis either. David Carruthers is an executive at BetOnSports in the UK. He was arrested while passing through the US for illegal gambling charges. His final destination was not the US. The plane was in US air space and they nabbed him for something that is totally legal in the UK where he lives and works. The US justification? Americans can illegally bet on UK sports, so naturally we have to shut down that website and throw its owners in jail.
Fellow Infidels, consider what happens if the EU passes their law making it illegal to say anything about Islam. Sure you can’t be arrested in the US for your online antics, but you never know when your employer may have you travel abroad and you may end up getting arrested for something that is perfectly legal on US soil.

News.com has this interesting little tidbit:

An addition to the treaty would require nations to imprison anyone guilty of “insulting publicly, through a computer system” certain groups of people based on characteristics such as race or ethnic origin, a requirement that could make it a crime to e-mail jokes about Polish people or question whether the Holocaust occurred.

Do you still feel safe? What if you say something that insults the Prophet Mohammad or if you make fun of Kim Jung Il’s hair, could you be investigated? According to Declan McCullugh yes you can! And the ACLU has 7 reasons why we should reject the treaty.

Reason number 3 is one of the more troubling.

Under this treaty, American law enforcement would be forced to cooperate with investigations of activities that are illegal abroad but perfectly legal in the U.S. That is because the treaty lacks a “dual criminality” provision that would require an activity to be a crime in both countries before one nation could enlist the police in another to help investigate. The outrageous result: American law enforcement agencies would be forced to cooperate with foreign authorities in conducting surveillance on American citizens who have committed no crime under U.S. law.

Worse, some of those mutual assistance requests will come from countries that have minimal civil liberties protections. The Convention includes not only Council of Europe members like Ukraine and Bulgaria, but will also over time be opened to China and other non-democratic nations – additions that the United States would have no right to veto. And even Western European countries have much different views on civil liberties than the U.S. – the U.K., for example, has much different free speech standards than the U.S. (most notably very broad standards for defamation and libel).

Get used to the idea of foreign powers knowing your business folks and prepare to be beheaded for insulting Islam.