Re: Big Brother Treaty Moves Ahead

From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Thu Apr 26 2001 - 14:31:27 MDT


Well then, they have this stuff called jarndyce law. So, because it
covers such a wide range of issues, many points may be addressed
consecutively, and there are always more.

Basically, there can be public meetings about anything. Sometimes it
depends on who wants to know, and why, or people want to think it that
way.

For example, I normally would want the same information that various
forms of local authorities have about myself only, but not other people,
for them not being my business. What that means in terms of freedom of
information is that they do not have privy to copyrights actually
involving personal identity. So, I think the law should be that you
should be able to ask some organization that tracks personal information
if it has information upon you or where its sole provider of information
upon you is, and to what levels they have access, where one simple
request for your own or your dependents' personal information store's
possible presense and its extent would be regular practice to actually
receive that information readily, and the complete extent of local,
personal information readily. Normally, that would only be a line in the
password file, yet it is not the case, because computers log by default.
So, it might be some lines in a flat file or lines from a database table,
those kinds of things. When they have more trust, then providers can be
certified to keep personal information private. And, our personal
computers are configurable by us, ourselves.

For example, each car has a license and registration, because there are
some legitimate public safety concerns about automobiles on the roads.
In the past, that meant witnesses would be able to identify some cars by
their licenses. Today, using the Internet, local radio, and PCs, the
officers on the road have wireless access to the license and registratoin
information on vehicles. By the same token, people can actually listen
to the radio on their scanner, because it's the actual public city's
radio.

So, I haven't looked at this treaty, let's see what it says. Here, on
the first page, it says this: "Please note that this page contains only
a selection of declassified texts. " Then it says: "Draft Convention on
Cyber-crime (Version No. 25)
This text has been declassified after the last Plenary meeting of
Committee PC-CY, held n Strasbourg, from 11 to 15 December 2000. This
text has also been submitted to the Parliamentary Assembly for opinion,
which is expected to give its opinion in April 2001. In the light of this
opinion, the text will be subject to a further revision by the European
Committee on Crime Problems (CDPC), which is then expected to approve it
at its next Plenary session in June 2001. The text then will be submitted
to the Committee of Ministers for adoption."

We might want to know who these actual people are, if they get a say, or
not.

Ross

Have a nice day,

Ross

John Marlow wrote:

> A controversial international treaty aimed at combatting online crime
> has entered the home stretch before ratification. ...
>
> "I would say it's the worst process I've seen so far when it comes to
> transparency in government," said Gus Hosein, a senior fellow at
> Privacy International and a lecturer at the London School of
> Economics. "For the entire time, there's been complete resistance to
> make any changes to accommodate the interests of industry or
> society."
>
> http://www.idg.net/ic_521511_1794_9-10000.html
> John Marlow

--
Ross Andrew Finlayson
Finlayson Consulting
Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/
"It's always one more."  - Internet multi-player computer game player



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