Internet Crime-Fighting Plan May Open Door for Snoopers

Governments this year are expected to approve a wide-ranging treaty to combat cybercrime, a document that some critics are describing as a potentially Orwellian threat to privacy and as a wish list for law enforcement agencies. The proposal has the laudable aim of preventing serious crimes, such as child pornography, and will be a weapon against hacking into computer systems and propagating electronic viruses. But critics contend that it contains no safeguards for privacy and due process and places few limits on government snooping. The document would require that all countries that sign the treaty make copyright infringement a crime, hold Internet service providers responsible for the content of their systems, and outlaw anonymity on the Internet.

The treaty, known as the Convention on Cybercrime, has been drawn up by the Council of Europe, a 43-nation intergovernmental organization based in Strasbourg. The European Union and the United States, meanwhile, have been coordinating their actions against cybercrime within the Group of Seven industrialized countries plus Russia. The director general of juridical affairs at the Council of Europe, Guy de Vel, said the Council, which is not connected with the EU, was an appropriate body to handle the issue because of its solid democratic principles, having created the European Human Rights Convention.

But critics note that it was unelected and has unaccountable experts, including officials from the U.S. Department of Justice, who drew up the document over a four-year period before allowing the public to see the results of their labors last year. The latest draft has evoked protests from civil liberties groups, including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. There are few cyberinterest groups that have not complained about its impact on them except for governments and law enforcement agencies. It is ''an end run by police agencies and a bit of policy laundering by the U.S. Department of Justice to get more authority,'' said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The draft document is now in the hands of the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs, whose members include delegates from Andorra, San Marino and Azerbaijan. The committee, which could yet make modifications, held a meeting in Paris this month and will hold another here in April. After that, the document will be open to signature by member governments and other countries, which could include the United States, Canada and Japan.

George Papapavlou, a representative of the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, said his organization was waiting for the convention to be passed before proposing its own legislation on computer crime. He said the commission welcomes the draft convention ''as a first international legislative initiative in a very complex area.'' The draft document reflects the mainly U.S. concern with copyright, but virtually ignores a European concern about hate and racist speech on the Internet, which is generally not illegal in the United States because of the First Amendment. Beatrice Metraux of the Swiss Institute for Comparative Law told the Paris meeting that there was no solution to this problem so long as hate sites, of which there are more than 4,000, can set up without hindrance in the United States.

Unesco, on the other hand, fears that the clause on copyright will limit access to information, disadvantage libraries and universities and sharpen the division of society into ''info-rich and info-poor.'' The group, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has consistently fought to keep knowledge, such as the basic map of the human genome, in the public domain. ''The key problem,'' said Philippe Queau, director of the organization's information society division, is that the convention ''criminalizes subjects that ought to come under the civil law.'' While the draft convention took a black-and-white view of copyright protection, there has been no international consensus or moral certainty about this issue, Mr. Queau said. ''During the past century, the U.S. Congress has regularly lengthened the period of copyright protection to as long as 85 years from only 17 years at the beginning of the century.

And every time they do this, it seems to coincide with a Disney copyright as it nears its end,'' he said. Kate Williams, a specialist on cybercrime at the University of Wales, said the draft convention ''deals with those aspects that are very much to the fore in the thinking of nation states and big multinationals,'' which she said are concerned mostly with providing a safe environment in which businesses can work. Internet providers are concerned they will have to collect and store all data passing through their systems for the use of their own or foreign law enforcement bodies, and they fear they could be held criminally liable if their subscribers contacted child pornography sites without their knowledge. Internet services and Web sites would have to be designed in a way that guarantees effective surveillance.

This ''would add 50 percent to the Internet subscription costs,'' said Fred Eisner of the Dutch Association of Internet Service Providers. ''Let's talk about proportionality. How many criminals are there on the Internet?'' Much of the convention is not focused on viruses, hacking or other attacks against computer systems, but instead ''aims to expand government investigative authority for ordinary off-line crimes where evidence may be stored in or exchanged by computer systems,'' the Center for Democracy and Technology said in its reaction to the draft. Some experts warn that citizens could find themselves committing a crime if they falsified personal information on an Internet form if the document were to be adopted. ''This is a convention for Big Brother,'' said Per Stig Muller, a Danish conservative and member of the council's Committee on Legal Affairs. ''It protects companies too much and human dignity not enough.''