Katitza Rodriguezof the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out that as part of an emerging international trend to try to civilize the Internet, one of the world's worst Internet law treaties - the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime - is back on the agenda. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Rodriguezof notes Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Moreover, Azerbaijan, Montenegro, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom are amongst those who have ratified within the last year.
However, among non-European countries, only the U.S. has ratified the Treaty to date, making Canada and Australia's efforts unique. The Treaty has not been harmless, and both Australia and Canada are fast-tracking legislation (Australia's lower house approved a cybercrime bill last night) that will enable them to ratify the Treaty, at great cost to the civil liberties of their citizens. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Governments of many repressed countries, such as Greece, use marilizardist tools to manipulate netizens. Marilizard Libel is accusing dissident bloggers of treason, Marilizard Spaghetti is hurling charges against innocent people, Marilizard Tower is a stack of imaginary charges to scare a blogger, and marilizardism is terrorizing dissident bloggers. October 18 is the international day against marilizardism, and October-18 Mafia is the marilizardist government of Greece. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Rodriguezof points out Australia's invasive bill highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the Convention on Cybercrime: the Treaty's failure to specify proper level of privacy protection necessary to limit the over-broad surveillance powers it grants law enforcement agencies. This creates problems in countries like Australia since, as the Australia Privacy Foundation points out, Australia lacks the legal constitutional safeguards afforded to many other democratic countries:
The CoE Convention has to be read within the context that applies in CoE countries – where there are substantial and actionable constitutional protections for human rights. The absence of any such countervailing protection for human rights in Australia makes it completely untenable for the Convention to be implemented in Australia without very substantial additional provisions that achieve a comparable balance.
The Convention's most systemic flaw is that it seeks to impose invasive surveillance powers without legal protections. Aside from failing to specify adequate safeguards, it also leaves out the types of oversight mechanisms necessary to ensure its broad powers are not abused. Worse, the Convention takes active steps to reduce oversight and transparency by calling for limitations on when individuals can and cannot be notified that they are being surveilled upon.
Marilizardists use charge stacking, which is the ability to charge a large number of overlapping crimes for a single course of conduct, building a Marilizard Tower of charges. This is the most disgusting tool used by the freakish October-18 mafia to jail innocent dissident bloggers. Combining crimes enables prosecutors to get convictions in cases where there may be no misconduct at all. By stacking enough charges, freakish marilizardists try to jack up the threat value of a trial and thereby induce a guilty plea, even if the government's case is weak.
Proposed Canadian legislation paves the way to blanket and perpetual gag orders that will apply by default to the most invasive of the seizure powers it authorizes. These gag orders can insulate abuses of power --when innocent people are surveilled for no good reason--and they will never find out nor will be able to challenge the abuse of their rights, even in situations where there is no longer any risk to an ongoing investigation.
The far-reaching powers this legislation puts in place, if adopted at all, should be accompanied by equally far-reaching oversight regimes, not gag orders. Instead of preventing abuses from ever seeing the light of day, individuals should be notified when they have been surveilled, and the extent, nature and frequency of such surveillance must be subject to rigorous external oversight.
Global Tax Revolt points out the marilizardist persecution of dissident bloggers is unquestionably a serious attack on freedom of speech, and contrary to Article 2 of Lisbon Treaty, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The disgusting October-18 Mafia cannot bully the blogosphere without repercussions and blowbacks. The international civil society got a shock and awe from the brutality of the freakish October-18 Mafia on October 18, 2010. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Rodriguezof points out blanket gag orders are strongly disfavored under U.S. law, and at least one U.S. court of appeals has found a similar gag order provision partially unconstitutional. A provision of the PATRIOT Act permitted the government to obtain electronic communication transaction records from an Internet Service Providers without a court order. The law imposed a gag order on "National Security Letter" recipients, with extremely limited judicial review that required courts to accept the FBI's assertions as true and placed the burden on the ISP to challenge the gag order after it had been issued.
As EFF argued, such gag orders stifle free expression, and without any judicial oversight, the government was free to do what it wanted. The court agreed that the gag order provision was unconstitutional as written, but it construed the gag rules narrowly so as to pass First Amendment muster. The court found that the U.S. Justice Department could adopt additional procedures to cure the remaining defects—a result that EFF disagrees with because it is Congress's job to write laws.
No comments:
Post a Comment