The US must not endorse Russia and China’s vision for cybersecurity

Excerpt

Even as Russia and China wage a relentless cyber war against the West, the United Nations is celebrating a new cybercrime treaty whose chief architects were none other than Moscow and Beijing. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that this U.N. convention, signed by 65 nations last month, is less about fighting cybercrime than about legitimizing authoritarian repression of free speech. Although his predecessor grudgingly supported the treaty, President Trump should lead the charge against it.

Russia’s and China’s efforts to shape global cyberspace norms stretch back decades. In 1999, Moscow proposed “principles of international information security,” although this initiative received little support. In 2001, Russia and China refused to ratify the first-ever international treaty on cybercrime, known as the Budapest Convention, viewing it as too intrusive and a threat to state sovereignty.

John Yoo is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Ivana Stradner is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.