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 Prison Functions.”
As extra elements of our lives intersect with the digital sphere, regulation enforcement world wide has more and more turned to digital proof to analyze and disrupt felony exercise. Google takes the specter of cybercrime very severely, and dedicates vital sources to combating it. When governments ship Google authorized orders to reveal consumer knowledge in reference to their investigations, we rigorously evaluate these orders to verify they fulfill relevant legal guidelines, worldwide norms, and Google’s insurance policies. We additionally repeatedly report the variety of these orders in our Transparency Report.
To make sure that transnational authorized calls for are issued in line with rule of regulation, we’ve lengthy referred to as for an worldwide framework for digital proof that features strong due course of protections, respects human rights (together with the best to free expression), and aligns with present worldwide norms. That is significantly vital within the case of transnational felony investigations, the place the authorized protections in a single jurisdiction could not align with these in others.
Such safeguards aren’t simply vital to making sure free expression and human rights, they’re additionally crucial to defending internet safety. Too usually, as we all know nicely from serving to rise up the Safety Researcher Authorized Protection Fund, people working to advance cybersecurity for the general public good find yourself going through felony fees. The Cybercrime Treaty shouldn’t criminalize the work of respectable cybersecurity researchers and penetration testers, which is designed to guard particular person methods and the online 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 regulation, 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 identical time, Member States ought to keep away from makes an attempt to criminalize actions that elevate vital freedom of expression points, or that really undercut the treaty’s purpose of decreasing cybercrime. That can require strengthening crucial guardrails and protections.
We urge Member States to heed calls from civil society teams to deal with crucial gaps within the Treaty and revise the textual content to guard customers and safety professionals — not endanger the safety of the online.
