Barry Steinhardt
Betty Shave
Gus Hosein

The Cybercrime Convention is described by Steinhardt and Hosein as overbroad and lacking meaningful protections for privacy. These points are not unfounded, but their arguments conflate a couple of issues.

Steinhardt and Hosein in their commentary both ignore the need for general harmonization of laws between nations regarding cybercrime. Betty Shave points out that cybercrime presents the unique problem of extraterritorial effects of cybercrime. Crime committed over the Internet easily crosses country boundaries that traditional crimes fail to do, simply because it is either cost prohibitive or more dangerous. Stealing credit card numbers in the United States from the safety of your home in Russia is simply not feasible in the “real” world.

The largest question here, brought up by one of the attendees, is that given the need for harmonization of cybercrime law, how do you meet this goal in a democratic fashion. Treaties inherently are undemocratic. Treaties are not voted upon, they are acts of the executive branch, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. Hosein argues that a model law would have been better. Shave concedes that model laws are useful, but that absent a binding agreement, it is only half of a solution. Although Shave did not reach this point, given the current state of MLATs and Extradition Treaties currently in place, which either require dual criminality or are based on a lists of crimes, a model law would not have dealt with this problem. One wonders if a new era of International Law will emerge in which extradition is no longer based on one-off understandings between two nations, but broader agreements which are open to countries world-wide.