FC: Draft treaty shows weakness of Euro-privacy laws --Bill Stewart

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

********

Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 10:28:41 -0700
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>, cypherpunks () cyberpass net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart () pobox com>
Subject: Proposed treaty demonstrates weakness of Euro Privacy Laws.

At 09:09 AM 05/03/2000 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote several articles
about European treaty activity, including one that about the
cybercrime treaty,
   http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/projets/cybercrime.htm
which requires service providers to keep logs, reveal them to cops,
and not reveal to the public when they reveal logs to cops,
and of course compel people to reveal passwords.

Some of this is Europe-only; some includes the US.

This is yet another demonstration of the "European Privacy Law" approach
to protecting privacy.  Some parts of the laws are durable
(Privacy Commissioners and other bureaucrats tend to stick around),
but some parts can be changed on a whim, at least to the extent that
law enforcement advocates can get laws or treaties adopted
to give them more things to enforce.

Maybe today the laws permit the government to inspect big companies'
big scary computer databases to see if anything bad is being done,
and require them to notify you whenever they do anything with your data,
and let the Privacy Ombudsman to access government databases, but
next week some bureaucrat will realize that the phone list in your mobile
phone
is a computer database of personal data, subject to inspection,
and the week after that they'll make a treaty letting the police
not notify you when _they're_ checking out your personal data,
or requiring them not to tell the Privacy Ombudman or whatever.

And it's nice to know that US Census records containing personal data
are protected for the next 75 years, or for the next 15 minutes if they
change the law that provides the protection because the
Drug Police Assistance Treaty requires access to data on Colombians.

The US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than what our
government does today.  Similarly, there are some EU human rights protections
that may be slightly more durable than regular laws which are easily replaced
by modified laws.  But anything less than that just isn't durable protection.
At least the treaty just requires participants to make the laws
implementing it
rather than applying directly - but that also means any moderating terms
that got compromised on to make the treaty more acceptable have the
opportunity to get dropped from each country's implementing laws.

Gakkk...  I keep agreeing more and more with David Brin's
"privacy is over, get used to it, video the government also" approaches :-)



>The document:
>http://www.politechbot.com/docs/treaty.html
>
>
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36047,00.html
>
>    Cyber-treaty Goes Too Far?
>    by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
>
>    3:00 a.m. May. 3, 2000 PDT
>    WASHINGTON -- U.S. and European police agencies will receive new
>    powers to investigate and prosecute computer crimes, according to a
>    preliminary draft of a treaty being circulated among over 40 nations.


                                Thanks!
                                        Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart () pobox com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

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