EU draft cyber crime treaty spells trouble

All the hard work the Government and private industry have done to turn the Republic into one of the more attractive European locations for technology companies and electronic business risks being lost because of a Council of Europe draft treaty on cyber crime.

As it now stands, the draft Convention on Cyber Crime introduces many of the elements of Britain's notoriously oppressive Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. This set of laws has been condemned almost unanimously by British business, and privacy and civil rights groups.

At issue is the degree of power on surveillance it hands to law enforcement agencies to monitor company e-mail and phone calls without a warrant, its restrictions on the use of encryption by businesses and individuals, and the guilty-'til-proven-innocent nature of some of its provisions.

For months, debate has raged in parliament and elsewhere over the Bill and the British government has been forced to backtrack on several of its provisions. The law is still so repressive that it is expected to be challenged immediately in the European Court of Human Rights.

By contrast, the Republic's set of laws governing e-commerce gives strong and specific protections for the use of encryption, while taking a light regulatory approach overall. Both international business and privacy advocacy groups have positively and publicly noted the restraint of the Irish approach.

The Convention on Cyber Crime could end up over-riding the pro-privacy and supportive ecommerce environment that exists as a result of our E-commerce Act. According to the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, an international coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups, the treaty could require Internet service providers to examine private e-mail messages and mandate that Internet companies retain records of customer activity.

The campaign is also worried that the treaty expands surveillance powers unacceptably, without safeguards on privacy and civil rights, and could give law enforcement bodies access to encryption keys.

In a statement, the campaign said the convention as it stands is "contrary to well established norms for the protection of the individual, that it improperly extends the police authority of national governments, that it will undermine the development of network security techniques, and that it will reduce government accountability in future law enforcement conduct".

Although the E-commerce Act dealt with some areas of relevance, the Department of Justice must design a set of laws to cover cyber crime, and the current process in Europe will influence those regulations. Laws on cyber crime can either dovetail with the e-commerce laws or introduce a punitive and damaging regulatory climate similar to that in Britain.

Given that the Government knows full well it is benefiting from international business concerns about the British situation, it would be ironic if we were to bring in the same environment, either through new laws of our own making or via a European treaty.

The Republic should lead the way in opposing the existing draft treaty and concerned individuals and businesses should mount a strong lobbying effort at both the national and European level. For more information see www.gilc.org or www.epic.org.

GLOBAL Crossing, the fibre-optic network company that brought a broadband pipe across the Atlantic to the Republic in concert with the Government, certainly does not have the best timing when it comes to dramatic announcements.

The company brought European journalists together in Zurich for a meeting with European executives and to make some general announcements about its fibre network.

At the meeting, they hyped the arrival the following week of a new Web hosting facility at its subsidiary, GlobalCenter in London - leaving many journalists wondering why the company hadn't combined the two events in the first place, since it discussed the strategies of both.

But even as the Zurich event was concluding, Global Crossing executives in the US were in final negotiations to sell GlobalCenter to rival firm Exodus, a fact duly announced the following morning, making much of the material covered during the briefing irrelevant.

Right on the heels of the launch of the London facility - at which an address by Global Crossing chief executive Mr Leo Hindery was given star billing along with a keynote by Web creator Mr Tim Berners-Lee - Global Crossing announced that Mr Hindery was stepping down to be replaced by founder Mr Tom Casey. Mr Hindery will now oversee GlobalCenter until its handover to Exodus is completed.

On top of all that, the company wouldn't confirm in Zurich whether it would be opening a large Web hosting facility in Clonshaugh, an announcement it duly made a week later in London - although by now the facility was to be an Exodus facility (is your head hurting yet?).

Irish journalists attending the Zurich event had little choice but to file stories that simply noted the announcement was likely, which meant the actual announcement came as something of an anti-climax.

Obviously the company had much going on behind the scenes about which it wasn't able to talk, but the sequence of events was poorly timed and managed nonetheless. Usually companies make the big announcements AT large press events, not in the days following them.

The company's strategy came across as confusing and much of the potential impact of the announcements and strategy briefings was lost in the twists and turns that followed.

LAST week's column on Slashdot.org's reader competition for the best spoof patent proposal - an indignant response to some of the patents issued in the tech sector in the United States - brought an amusing e-mail from a Dublin patent attorney.

Mr Liam Birkett, of the 70year-old patent and trade mark legal firm FR Kelly in Ballsbridge, notes that the company regularly hosts a dinner for colleagues from around the world at which the entire menu is written in "patentese".

Among the items is this superb dessert: "Two latterly held bananas having engaging ends that either pivotally interconnect or are in juxtaposition. This clypeform is topped with a circular filo disc to present a substantially convex upper side of annular form containing a plurality of raised ridges and supports a torque-shaped coconut sorbet coagulation pierced with a sphenoid."

Clearly, the people who write press releases for large technology companies attend the same school of writing. Or should I say, the team players who leverage best-of-breed explanatory solutions that aim to delight customers and journalists for a top return on investment and guaranteed value-add all appear to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie