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A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

michaelgeist.ca

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Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#51

Post by a34729t »

irishcoffee wrote: post #46
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor Why? Where is any equivalent measures coming from the US left? It is because that’s how people identify as Democrats want them to behave? There seems to be a rift there.

Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses” This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree. Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s bes…

Nah, gonna be populist idiots from the other side.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#52

Post by leonvoss »

>As of May 2026, the following 76 participants have signed the treaty: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Columbia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Czechia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, European Union, Fiji, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, Thailand, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.

Interestingly, Qatar signed it with [the reservation](https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...) that

>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.

These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.

I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#53

Post by firefax »

1over137 wrote: post #47
firefax wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any thoughts on the bill? One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed. Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?) I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible l…

>given you have a multiparty system [... why you struggle so hard to... Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.

Aha, thanks for this.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#54

Post by WarmWash »

brandon272 wrote: post #11
failbuffer wrote: post #3

When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them? For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks. Wit…

The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance. An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.

I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.

For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.

So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#55

Post by mistrial9 »

b112 wrote: post #45

The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context. And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for. In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that pers…

this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.

Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#56

Post by nostrademons »

iamnothere wrote: post #40
nostrademons wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc. When it comes to laws, libertaria…

Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.

You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#57

Post by nostrademons »

inigyou wrote: post #26
nostrademons wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc. When it comes to laws, libertaria…

And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.

Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#58

Post by WarmWash »

ifwinterco wrote: post #38
zuzululu wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Have you ever actually been to Canada? It's quite nice, pretty clean and safe, feels fairly functional, people are totally different to Americans (in a very good way). Hard to judge based on short trips/holidays and not living there but my immediate impression coming from south east England was how pleasant everyone was and that everyone seemed pretty happy instead of being depressed, so that was nice

You can keep a house really warm and cozy while burning furniture

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#59

Post by squigz »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #43
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…) I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the he…

Isn’t it very ironic to post this under a pseudonym? Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.

Is GP running for political office here on HN or something?

Otherwise I can't really see your point.

Re: A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

#60

Post by firefax »

Teever wrote: post #41
firefax wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any thoughts on the bill? One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed. Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?) I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible l…

It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process. An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the over…

>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence

So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)

Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.

> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.

Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.

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