One knows that there just has to be a problem, when the otherwise woke Scientific American.com gets to reporting on something others regard as a threat to liberty. Thus, despite opposition from the good guy freedom fighters, and even some tech companies, the UN has approved its international cybercrime treaty, the Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes. We did not hear much about this, as expected, as these things are not meant to be in anyway democratic. For the UN, democracy is as dated concept, and the game plan is rule by their elites, known as the world government of the New World Order.
While operating under the guise of controlling a real problem, cybercrime, the treaty's real objective was to motivate governments to be even more tyrannical, where any perceived crime could be prosecuted if connected in some way to a computer, and that entails everything involving free speech to criticise globalist ideologies such as mass immigration. Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) policy director for global privacy said: "The U.N. cybercrime convention is a blank check for surveillance abuses." "It can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations."
At present, there are so many of these freedom restricting acts, that it is hard to even list them all on a blank Word document. No stone is being left unturned to eliminate human liberty in the technocratic dystopia that the elites have almost completely assembled.
This is not yet been voted on, and in principle Australia could opt out, but given its present track records on repression, this is going to be another hard row to hoe.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/0724--un-cybercrime/
"The United Nations approved its first international cybercrime treaty yesterday. The effort succeeded despite opposition from tech companies and human rights groups, who warn that the agreement will permit countries to expand invasive electronic surveillance in the name of criminal investigations. Experts from these organizations say that the treaty undermines the global human rights of freedom of speech and expression because it contains clauses that countries could interpret to internationally prosecute any perceived crime that takes place on a computer system.
The U.N. committee room erupted in applause after the convention's adoption, as many members and delegates celebrated the finale of three years of difficult discussions. In commending the adoption, delegates such as South Africa's cited the treaty's support for countries with relatively smaller cyber infrastructure.
But among the watchdog groups that monitored the meeting closely, the tone was funereal. "The U.N. cybercrime convention is a blank check for surveillance abuses," says Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) policy director for global privacy. "It can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations."
In the coming weeks, the treaty will head to a vote among the General Assembly's 193 member states. If it's accepted by a majority there, the treaty will move to the ratification process, in which individual country governments must sign on.
The treaty, called the Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, was first devised in 2019, with debates to determine its substance beginning in 2021. It is intended to provide a global legal framework to prevent and respond to cybercrimes. In a July statement before the treaty's adoption, the U.S. and fellow members of the Freedom Online Coalition described it as an opportunity "to enhance cooperation on combatting and preventing cybercrime and collecting and sharing electronic evidence for serious crimes" but noted that the agreement could be misused as a tool for human rights violations and called for its scope to be more precisely defined. (The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.)
The agreement is a reaction to major technological developments in the past few decades that allowed cyber threats to evolve at a rapid rate. In 2023 alone, more than 340 million people worldwide were affected by cybercrime, according to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The years of deliberation over the long and complex treaty culminated in this week's closing session of negotiations. Critics such as EFF and Human Rights Watch (HRW) argue the text's scope is too broad, allowing countries to apply it to offenses beyond what were typically considered cybercrimes in the past. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which went into effect in 2004, is the only other major international treaty to address cybercrime. It sought to criminalize a range of offences, including cyber-enabled crimes (such as online bank scams or identity theft) and cyber-dependent ones (such as hacking and malware), while still aiming to accommodate human rights and liberties.