China, north korea, and russia, all prolific cybercriminal nations with significant state backing of the same, are signatories. This means it's at best meaningless and at worst surrenders power to a regime with partial control by objectively bad actors. Staying out of this was the right move.

Plus it has too many implications for surveillance and security; poor idea in any case.

> It also creates legal regimes to monitor, store and allow cross-border sharing of information without specific data protections. Access Now’s Raman Jit Singh Chima said the convention effectively justifies “cyber authoritarianism at home and transnational repression across borders.”

None of this sounds good for privacy and data protection.

Opting out of the treaty was probably a good choice. Opting out doesn’t preclude the US from cooperating with international cybercrime investigations, but it does avoid more data collection, surveillance, and sharing.

When countries like North Korea, which depends on cybercrime to fund itself, are signatories, you have to wonder whether this agreement means what its title says.

Previous threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41207987 ("EFF’s concerns about the UN Cybercrime Convention (eff.org)", 99 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39129274 ("Proposed UN cybercrime treaty has evolved into an expansive surveillance tool (eff.org)", 64 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210110 ("New U.N. Cybercrime Treaty Unanimously Approved, Could Threaten Human Rights (scientificamerican.com)", 53 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41221403 ("UN Cybercrime Convention to Overrule Bank Secrecy (therage.co)", 42 comments)

Why would the US give away it's power? I do not see anything to gain here. At least 2 of the big players are duplicitous bad actors (ie take more than they give) ... If they want prove otherwise then let Tencent teams compete in public CTFs again and disclose 0days.

Couple clicks to get to the list so here it is. Not countries I usually associate with caring about privacy.

Algeria,Angola,Australia,Austria,Azerbaijan,Belarus,Belgium,Brazil,Brunei Darussalam,Burkina Faso,Cambodia,Chile,China,Costa Rica,Côte d'Ivoire,Cuba,Czech Republic,Democratic People's Republic of Korea,Democratic Republic of the Congo,Djibouti,Dominican Republic,Ecuador,Egypt,European Union,France,Ghana,Greece,Guinea-Bissau,Iran (Islamic Republic of),Ireland,Jamaica,Mozambique,Namibia,Nauru,Nicaragua,Nigeria,Palau,Papua New Guinea,Peru,Philippines,Poland,Portugal,Qatar,Russian Federation,Rwanda,Saudi Arabia,Slovakia,Slovenia,South Africa,Spain,Sri Lanka,State of Palestine,Sweden,Thailand,Togo,Türkiye,Uganda,United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,United Republic of Tanzania,Uruguay,Uzbekistan,Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of),Viet Nam,Zimbabwe

Once again, Chat Control is a never ending battle.

Wow so the hosts and beneficiaries of cybercrime wrote a treaty on it (with a ton of additional surveillance mandates included, of course) and the US didn't sign on. How disappointing.

> cybercrime — which the U.N. estimates costs $10.5 trillion around the world annually.

That's almost 10% of global GDP. Who comes up with these numbers?

I don't understand why political topics such as international treaties like this are upvoted and kept on the front page? To be clear, I'm in favor of politics being discussed on here, but this is so uninteresting and pointless to discuss IMO. International law can be ignored even by countries that agreed to it. What are you going to do, invade? As pointed out, countries like China and Russia signed onto a cybercrime treaty... pure slop.

Just seems very distracting when actual abuses and interesting political topics are hidden away in /active (like ICEs use of facial recognition)

full list of signatories: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...

Don’t have to look far to find out why.

Per the article: “Illicit flows of money, concealed through cryptocurrencies and digital transactions, finance the trafficking of drugs, arms, and terror. And businesses, hospitals, and airports are brought to a standstill by ransomware attacks.”

Then there’s this: Inside the Trump family’s global crypto cash machine https://www.reuters.com/investigations/inside-trump-familys-...

All this would do is drive criminals to poorer countries that can't stop crime as well. Just like many scammers being based in South Asia, or billionaires moving their money to tax havens. It just takes one country to allow this stuff or at least not stop it, and your treaties are just pieces of paper.

UN should move its HQ outside of US. It is obvious they have become a bad host.

When Cambodia is a signatory, you know this is just whitewash, or even 'protective intelligence' ie using the shared international intelligence to protect the scams and evade enforcement. Keep your enemies close.

The government is shut down, treaties need to be ratified by the Senate.

text of the treaty: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...

I wouldn't get excited about the US "not signing". With the government shutdown, they might just be waiting for the document to be in New York before they bother. Hanoi is far.

64ss1: This Convention shall be open to all States for signature in Hanoi in 2025 and thereafter at United Nations Headquarters in New York until 31 December 2026.

Article 37 is spooky. Expands extradition to where there might not be preexisting extradition treaties.

Fuck article 11. It's the EU's "any program for committing cybercrime is a crime" law, and makes programmers culpable. IANAL, but it actually looks like it criminalizes the entire software supply chain. Sure, there's a clause in there that looks like it's supposed to protect security research (11s2) but this is the thinnest of loincloths.

It also seems to apply to "crime where there was a computer somewhere around". As for what constitutes "crime":

Article 2:(h) “Serious crime” shall mean conduct constituting an offence punishable by a maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty;

...that seems to mean that if publishing information against the state regime is punishable by 4+ years and you used a computer to do it, there is now a basis for seizing your data and extraditing you.

I'm not even going to get into the implications this has for damaging privacy in general. This is some dark ass shit.

The UN should stick to environmental treaties

> The U.K. and European Union joined China, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and dozens of other nations in signing the convention...Human rights groups warned on Friday that it effectively forces member states to create a broad electronic surveillance dragnet that would include crimes that have nothing to do with technology.

Countries like Nigeria, Morocco, North Korea and Russia signing a "cybercrime" treaty is just hilarious to me.

I don't believe for a second that these countries want to crack down on cybercrime, considering their citizens are the main perpetrators and beneficiaries of it, and they've taken zero actions to prevent it before today. Lagos is essentially the Silicon Valley of internet fraud, and it happens with permission from the highest levels of their government.

This obviously is just an excuse to create a global dragnet for governments looking to crack down on dissent.

No thank you and I’m loath to see the EU sign up to this with a ton of authoritarian states. Things like this and the continued pushing of stuff like Chat Control has convinced me the EU stands to turn our countries into flawed democracies and eventually authoritarian states.