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A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/07/a-surveillance-treaty-in-disguise-the-trouble-with-canadas-quiet-decision-to-sign-the-un-cybercrime-convention/
81•iamnothere•1h ago

Comments

alephnerd•48m ago
So has Australia, the EU, and the UK [0].

That said, being a signatory has limited impact as long as it isn't ratified.

[0] - https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...

ignoramous•35m ago
> the EU, and the UK

The EU has their own cybercrime treaty: https://commission.europa.eu/law/cross-border-cases/judicial...

But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies.

alephnerd•28m ago
E-Evidence sharing is just a subset of the broader UN Cybercrime treaty which has been signed.
failbuffer•38m ago
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?

For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.

With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?

mcsniff•33m ago
Because libertarians generally want fewer laws, not more.
dexterdog•26m ago
And there are far too few of them elected to have any real impact.
jambalaya8•10m ago
that doesn't mean they don't want some of the 'right laws'. otherwise they would be anarchists and communists not libertarians.
jagged-chisel•32m ago
> … why can't we make that happen?

Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.

Cider9986•32m ago
Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?

https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/

>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.

>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.

>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.

>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...

Waterluvian•34m ago
It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)

I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.

Iolaum•21m ago
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.

I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(

airstrike•18m ago
Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.

The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.

brandon272•25m ago
The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.

An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.

watwut•17m ago
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley

Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.

Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.

HPsquared•10m ago
Freedom to put whatever you want in the EULA.
Cider9986•6m ago
Whereas traditional Democrats and Republicans are all protecting privacy?

Thomas Massie is a wealthy libertarian and introduced a bill to protect privacy.

olyjohn•14m ago
Because they're not libertarians. They're greedy narcissists who what to do whatever they want to anybody and just say that it's libertarian.
nostrademons•9m ago
The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.

When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.

Teever•5m ago
As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.

Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.

What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?

firefax•3m ago
>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?

Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)

I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.

The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)

A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/07/a-surveillance-treaty-in-disguise-the-trouble-with-canadas-qu...
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