World’s Worst Internet Laws Sneak Through the Senate

Imagine: Armed thugs decend. You're under arrest. For what? You've broken an obscure law in Azerbaijan by saying you, as an American, don't like your American president. Sound crazy? Meet the new Cybercrime Treaty...

The Cybercrime Treaty was ratified by the Senate late last night. The U.S. will now have to comply to requests for assistance from fifteen countries, and growing.

The Convention on Cybercrime is a sweeping treaty that has been waiting in the wings of the Senate for nearly three years. Now the administration is putting pressure on the Senate to ratify it in the next two days. If it does, it would mean the U.S. would enforce not just our own, but the rest of the world's bad Net laws. Call your Senator now, and ask them to hold its ratification.

The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries' "cybercrime" laws - even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdiction's requests to log their users? behavior without due process, or compensation.

Criminal politicians fear the Internet becuase it has revealed their crimes and lies when the mainstream media will not. This treaty sounds to me like it could easily be twisted and used crookedly. As I've said for years: They want to make it a crime to know about their crimes. This may be the way they do it.