This week, the United Nations convened member states to proceed its years-long negotiations on the UN Cybercrime Treaty, titled “Countering the Use of Info and Communications Applied sciences for Legal Functions.”
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 prison exercise. Google takes the specter of cybercrime very significantly, and dedicates important assets to combating it. When governments ship Google authorized orders to reveal person knowledge in reference to their investigations, we rigorously evaluation these orders to verify they fulfill relevant legal guidelines, worldwide norms, and Google’s insurance policies. We additionally recurrently report the variety of these orders in our Transparency Report.
To make sure that transnational authorized calls for are issued per rule of legislation, now we have lengthy known as for an worldwide framework for digital proof that features strong due course of protections, respects human rights (together with the precise to free expression), and aligns with present worldwide norms. That is significantly necessary within the case of transnational prison investigations, the place the authorized protections in a single jurisdiction could not align with these in others.
Such safeguards aren’t simply necessary to making sure free expression and human rights, they’re additionally essential to defending internet safety. Too typically, as we all know effectively from serving to rise up the Safety Researcher Authorized Protection Fund, people working to advance cybersecurity for the general public good find yourself dealing with prison fees. The Cybercrime Treaty mustn’t criminalize the work of official cybersecurity researchers and penetration testers, which is designed to guard particular person programs and the net as an entire.
UN Member States have a possibility to strengthen international 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 Common Declaration on Human Rights, and aligned with ideas of necessity and proportionality. On the similar time, Member States ought to keep away from makes an attempt to criminalize actions that elevate important freedom of expression points, or that truly undercut the treaty’s aim of lowering cybercrime. That can 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 net.
