The Biden administration plans to support a controversial cybercrime treaty at the United Nations this week despite concerns that it could be misused by authoritarian regimes, according to senior government officials.
The agreement would be the first legally binding UN agreement on cybersecurity and could become a global legal framework for countries to cooperate on preventing and investigating cybercriminals. However, critics fear it could be used by authoritarian states to try to pursue dissidents overseas or collect data from political opponents.
Still, the officials said there are persuasive reasons to support the treaty. For instance, it would advance the criminalization of child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual spreading of intimate images, they said.
In addition, the wider involvement of member states would make cybercrime and electronic evidence more available to the US, one official said. If all the members sign the agreement, it would update extradition treaties and provide more opportunities to apprehend cybercriminals and have them extradited, the official added.
Hundreds of submissions from advocacy groups and other parties criticized US involvement in the agreement. The US plans to strictly enforce human rights and other safeguards in the treaty, the officials said, adding that the Department of Justice would closely scrutinize requests and refuse to provide any assistance that was inconsistent with the agreement.
Last month, six Democratic senators wrote that the treaty could “legitimize efforts by authoritarian countries like Russia and China to censor and surveil internet users, furthering repression and human-rights abuses around the world. While the executive branch’s efforts to steer this treaty in a less-harmful direction are commendable, more must be done to keep the convention from being used to justify such actions.”
In its current form, the convention was “a serious threat to privacy, security, freedom of expression and artificial intelligence (AI) safety,” the letter added.
While the treaty is expected to pass the vote in the UN, it was highly unlikely it would be ratified by the US government unless there was implementation of human-rights controls, the official said.
Photo: Joe Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on Nov. 7. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg
Topics Cyber