Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237879

  When I was at EFF, we did try to get UN official accreditation, but China would consistently veto it.. I was EFF's international activist and later international director for a number of years.. more of the work than you'd imagine has a global side to it. This has been true since the days of [DMCA].. elements of which were rejected by the US Congress in the mid-Nineties, then policy-laundered through WIPO into the 1996 Copyright Treaty, which meant that it had to become law after the US Senate consented to it in 1999. (Treaties don't need the support of both houses in the US). EFF and other orgs at the time learned the lesson that regional and international agreements can often be an end-run around local democracy or norms -- and that local laws (from the DMCA to the GDPR) can have wider ramifications on a global network..

  EFF and partner groups often contribute to government and international proposals (a hundred-or-so of them have been involved in the cybercrime treaty process for many years [1] and I believe got it to a fairly good place before a last-minute push by some states to introduce more surveillance into it.)

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/joint-statement-propos...

Earlier HN threads:

UN Cybercrime Convention To Overrule Bank Secrecy, 40 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41221403

UN cybercrime treaty unanimously approved, 50 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210110

>it had to become law after the US Senate consented to it in 1999. (Treaties don't need the support of both houses in the US).

To be clear for those not familiar with American government structure, this is an intended separation of powers between the two Houses of Congress.

The House of Representatives (aka Lower House) is tasked primarily with duties concerning money and commerce. Representatives have the sole authority to draft and ratify budgets, Senators may only ratify or not.

The Senate (aka Upper House) is tasked primarily with affairs of state including but not limited to confirming and impeaching executive, judicial, and other public servant appointments; drafting and ratifying treaties; and helping ensure all States have a say in most political affairs.

Most legislative tasks do in fact require drafting and ratification of sibling bills by both Houses of Congress, but certain things like treaties are the sole jurisdiction of one House or the other.

The Senate has traditionally been viewed as more prestigious and powerful than the House, but actually neither is strictly better than the other.

That is an accurate representation of how it used to and in theory work. Quaint

As the above former EFF guy comment essentially stated “after a bunch of work and a long time and a bunch of effort … last minute subversion undid everything and we were left with more tyrannical surveillance pushed by compromised and corrupted, bought and paid for traitors”

The direct election of Senators considerably changed the Senate. The Senate’s job was to represent the interests of the individual states, the House was to represent the people. That’s why the Senate has treaty powers — as the United States (emphasis on the plural of states) are/were each sovereign entities and the Senate thusly had to approve of any treaty that woukd effectively bind states to an international agreement.

Direct election of senators changed that because the senators no long answer to the state governments but to the population of the state directly.

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