Canada signed UN surveillance treaty
Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Public Safety, and the Sean Fraser, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime; Strengthening International Cooperation for Combating Certain Crimes Committed by Means of Information and Communications Technology Systems and for the Sharing of Evidence in Electronic Form of Serious Crimes.
Anita Anand said: “Cybercrime is a global threat that requires a global response. Canada’s signing of the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime reflects our commitment to international cooperation to prevent serious crimes. Together, we will stand up to cybercrime while reinforcing trust in digital technologies and the global fight against transnational crime.”
The treaty was first proposed by Russia in 2017 as an alternative to the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention, the established international framework for combating cybercrime, which Russia has consistently refused to join. In 2019, when the United Nations General Assembly voted on whether to begin negotiations, Canada joined the United States and the European Union in opposing the resolution, arguing that it could pave the way for broader state surveillance and increased government control over digital communications.
In December 2024, nearly two dozen Canadian organizations and experts—including Amnesty International Canada, the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, PEN Canada, OpenMedia, and Citizen Lab researchers Ron Deibert and Kate Robertson—issued a detailed open letter urging the federal government not to sign the treaty. They warned that it would create a permanent mechanism for transnational repression, placing diaspora communities in Canada at greater risk while undermining the legal safeguards embedded in Canada’s mutual legal assistance framework.
Kate Robertson has also cautioned that the treaty could facilitate the proliferation of mercenary spyware by making states complicit in its use. At the same time, more than 120 cybersecurity researchers warned that the treaty’s broad offences could criminalize legitimate, good-faith security research.
Despite these concerns, the Canadian government proceeded without public consultation, offered no substantive response to the issues raised in the letter, and signed the treaty without addressing the objections put forward by civil society, legal experts, and cybersecurity professionals.
It all happened quietly, in the middle of July, with little or no attention from the mainstream media, while the FIFA Club World Cup dominated the headlines and distracted public attention.
Let’s see some definitions:
Article 2: Use of terms
For the purposes of this Convention:
(a) “Information and communications technology system” shall mean any device or group of interconnected or related devices, one or more of which, pursuant to a program, gathers, stores and performs automatic processing of electronic data;
(b) “Electronic data” shall mean any representation of facts, information or concepts in a form suitable for processing in an information and communications technology system, including a program suitable to cause an information and communications technology system to perform a function;
(c) “Traffic data” shall mean any electronic data relating to a communication by means of an information and communications technology system, generated by an information and communications technology system that formed a part in the chain of communication, indicating the communication’s origin, destination, route, time, date, size, duration or type of underlying service;
(d) “Content data” shall mean any electronic data, other than subscriber information or traffic data, relating to the substance of the data transferred by an information and communications technology system, including, but not limited to, images, text messages, voice messages, audio recordings and video recordings;
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/convention-full-text.html
What is it all about? It’s just another piece of the Agenda 2030 puzzle, similar to digital ID, digital currency, and a social credit system. It’s a total surveillance state run by international megacorporations, tracking every aspect of your life. There will be no privacy, no free speech, and no freedom of expression. Every negative comment about the regime or current narrative could be prosecuted, and people could be silenced.
The pattern is quite clear. Problem. Reaction. Solution. The same people are behind all three. And you? You will become an economic slave, and your behaviour—and even your thoughts—could be tracked and controlled by a digital prison that we are still helping to build.
DB
