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

John Yoo and Ivana Stradner

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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.

But Moscow and Beijing did not give up. In 2018, the Russians launched a fresh effort to replace the Budapest Convention. They formed a new U.N. working group on cyber as an alternative to a rival U.S.-favored forum.

The following year, the U.N. General Assembly passed a Russian resolution, cosponsored by China and other authoritarian countries and opposed by Washington and its allies, to begin drafting a new international treaty to counter cybercrime.

The U.S. and other democracies then had little choice but to join that process or else cede it entirely to the authoritarians. And in 2021, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration launched an abortive effort to find common ground with Moscow on cyber and other issues.

During the drafting of the convention, the U.S. and its allies advocated for “a focused criminal justice instrument which is aimed at improving the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime” as traditionally defined. Moscow, Beijing and like-minded regimes, by contrast, pushed for an expansive definition of cybercrime that would provide U.N. approval of repression of online political dissent and independent media.