Re: US-Europe cybercrime treaty happening in secret --M.Wessling

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

Reply From: Daniel River Phoenix <phoenix_dan () hotmail com>


I think this is alot of bullshit. First we have the FBI cutting deals with
nortel networks to tap our lines then we get laws forbiding hacking tools
amongst other treaties that have been signed. I will literally have to
delete my hardrives just to make sure there are no hacking tools and even
my registry. I think we should have a little more privacy than this. To me
this just looks like the government trying to control the internet. The
only way to circumvent this is for hackers to keep doing what they are
doing and to build sophisticated encryption routines for our hardrives so
that if at least the gov't suspects info on the computer it would take
them years to decrypt the information. Look at what happened when pgp came
out.  The gov't tried to step in and control the export of it. Even
contacted the author for a way to break the encryption!!! The only way the
gov't is going to succeed is by hiring these hackers and I have found them
doing that!!! I think a national vote is in order. All computer
professionals should have a say in these sort of acts and laws that affect
us all.

> Forwarded From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
>
> [The following note says a draft treaty would outlaw distributing (think:
> posting on your web site) hacking and eavesdropping tools, including
> presumably ones that are currently readily available like crack and
> tcpdump. I wonder if there will be a grandfather clause for the version of
> crack I compiled in 1992? If not, does this mean I'll be a criminal if I
> lend a CDROM with my hard drive archive to a friend? Hmmm. --Declan]

[snip..]

> The Council of Europe is preparing a so-called "Cybercrime"
> treaty. European countries, the USA, Canada, Japan and
> South Africa are involved in the talks. There is no draft
> made public but a letter of the Dutch minister of Justice to
> the Dutch parliament is mentioning some of the details of
> what is discussed during the negotiations about the treaty.
> The draft is prepared by an ad-hoc group of experts
> (PC-CY) who will have to finish their work by the end of
> 2000. There is only a Dutch language version of the letter
> (if you can read Dutch, I've put it on
> http://www.bof.nl/cybercrime_treaty.pdf

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