Global Prosecutors E-Crime Network Newsletter Issue 32 May 2016 Welcome to the May 2016 edition of the GPEN newsletter.

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1 Global Prosecutors E-Crime Network Newsletter Issue 32 May 2016 Welcome to the May 2016 edition of the GPEN newsletter. This month we are focussing on the Draft Convention on Electronic Evidence which is now available for your comments. The Convention has been produced and organised by Stephen Mason who is a lawyer and an expert on Electronic Signatures and Electronic evidence in response to a growing awareness of the difficulties experienced by prosecutors and judges due to the wide variation in electronic evidence procedures and standards. We have an introduction to the Draft Convention on Electronic Evidence and an interview with its author Stephen Mason. Also in this issue we have a Special 30% discount for GPEN members for the Lawtech Europe conference (more details at the end of the newsletter), a round-up of the month s cybercrime news, and the latest on the GPEN webinar schedule there are a few places left for Leotrina Macomber s webinar on Cybercrime in the Kingdom of Tonga and in June we are delighted to welcome George- Maria Tyendezwa from Nigeria talking about International cooperation and the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime in West Africa. I look forward to talking to you there. Sarah Lennard-Brown GPEN communications team If you have any information or articles for the newsletter or website please send it to Sarah@gpen.info or post on the GPEN forum I look forward to talking to you there. Join the GPEN community 1

2 News Facebook sued over privacy concerns Facebook has been sued by a group of subscribers in Illionios, United States of America, over claims that it breaches users rights to privacy. Facebook users can tag their own photos and friend s photos with their names. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act prevents companies from storing information such as facial features without the individual s permission. Facebook had claimed that the statute did not apply to them as their headquarters is outside the state of Illinois but this was dismissed by United States District Judge James Donato. The way Facebook processes biometric indicators (such as the lenght of a persons nose) to enable facial recognition is secret, but the use of auto-tagging, the process by which people put names to friends faces in photos, enables the system to identify people around the world. The case will be heard on the 15th June Find out more about the Facebook court case at the SFGate website Find out more about prosecuting crimes involving data theft in the GPEN library Tanzania Permanent Secretary defends new Cybercrime Law In Tanzania the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Works, Transport and Communication, Professor Faustin Kamuzora has defended the implementation of Tanzania's 2015 Cybercrime Act. There have been some worries about the new law based around fears that it would stifle Government opposition parties from campaigning and questioning policies. Professor Faustin Kamuzora said the Tanzania Cybercrime law was very similar to the laws passed in the countries around Tanzania and that although there were a few challenges the 2015 Cybercrime Act was proving very effective. What do you think? Are you debating new cybercrime laws? Start a debate on the GPEN forum More about this story on the Tanzania Daily News website 2

3 Brazil shuts down WhatsApp in decryption row The State versus Corporate encryption struggle has erupted again in Brazil where Judge Marcel Maia Montalvão from Lagarto, a town in North East Brazil, ordered WhatsApp to shut down for 72 hours. This is the second time that Brazil has shut down WhatsApp for refusing to hand over user data requested by Prosecutors. WhatsApp statement in response to the ruling was: This decision punishes more than 100 million Brazilians who rely on our services. Brazil has a population of 200 million and it is estimated that between 86% and 90% of Brazilians with mobile phones have used WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook. WhatsApp is now completely encrypted and the company claims that it cannot decrypt the messages and it does not store them. Read more about the WhatsApp case on the Naked Security website Start a debate about this issue on the GPEN forum Costa Rica based Liberty Reserve founder guilty of money laundering The founder of Liberty Reserve, a virtual currency that has been disbanded, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for money laundering. Arthur Budovsky was sentenced in the United States District Court of Southern New York and also ordered to pay a fine of $500,000. Liberty Reserve was founded in 2006 in Costa Rica, advertising itself as the Internet s largest payment processor and money transfer system. When the virtual currency was shut down in 2013 it had 5.5 million user accounts and had generated between $1 billion and $1.8 billion. Arthur Budovsky was found guilty of running an extraordinarily successful, large scale money laundering operation that catered for cybercriminals. Read more about the Liberty Reserve case on the PC World website Read more about prosecuting organised cybercrime on the GPEN website 3

4 GPEN Webinars GPEN Webinars are supported by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the International Association of Prosecutors. Book your place for the next GPEN Webinar To book a webinar place Sarah@gpen.info - the webinars are free and certificates are issued to everyone who attends. May 19th - Fighting Cybercrime in the Kingdom of Tonga Date and time: 19th May 2016, 07:30 British Summer Time (19:30 Tonga Standard Time, Fiji Summer Time, New Zealand Daylight Time, Phoenix Island Time, Tokelau Time and West Samoa Time) Presenter: Leotrina Macomber, Attorney General's Office of the Kingdom of Tonga June 8th - International cooperation and the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime in West Africa Date and time: 8 th June 2016, 10:30 British Summer Time Presenter: T. George-Maria Tyendezwa, Nigeria July 14th - Online Business Models Infringing Intellectual Property Rights through Phishing, Malware Dissemination and Other Fraudulent Means Date and time: 14 th July 2016, 10:00 British Summer Time (11:00 European Central Time) Presenter: Erling Vestegaard, European Union Intellectual Property Office Catch up with the GPEN Webinars If you missed our webinars do not worry. You can listen to the webinar and access the associated documents in the GPEN library. The webinars are available for members of the IAP (you need your IAP username and password to access the website). Centre/Webinars 4

5 Topic focus Convention on Electronic Evidence Electronic Evidence presents many issues to prosecutors especially when working on cases that involve cross border cooperation. Standards and expectations about the form and quality of evidence vary widely across the world. Electronic Evidence expert Stephen Mason was inspired to take action on the issue after many discussions with judges and lawyers around the Globe. He has taken the initiative and put together a Draft Convention on Electronic Evidence for discussion. The Draft Convention is the first treaty on electronic evidence, dealing with the status of electronic evidence; the investigation and examination of electronic evidence, and general provisions regarding the recognition and admissibility of electronic evidence from foreign jurisdictions. The main objective of the draft Convention on Electronic Evidence is to pursue a common policy towards electronic evidence, taking into account the differences in the treatment of evidence in individual jurisdictions. The aim is to encourage judges and lawyers to more fully understand the concept of electronic evidence in the interests of providing for fairness in legal proceedings; to promote adequate legal procedures, to implement appropriate legislation where necessary and to promote international co-operation. The draft Convention uses parts of the Commonwealth Draft Model Law on Electronic Evidence along with text written by Stephen Mason. The consultation on the Convention was launched at the DataFocus 2016 conference in Zagreb on 5th April 2016 and there will be a Workshop on the Draft Convention on Electronic Evidence on 20th May 2016 between 14:30 and 17:00 at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR. All are welcome and entry is free but you need to book a place as there is limited space. Your opinion on this draft convention would be very valuable and Stephen is encouraging everyone, scholars, judges, lawyers and digital evidence specialists to take part and comment to help refine the draft convention into its final form. To take part you need to: 5

6 1. Register to take part in the consultation 2. Visit the Electronic Evidence website and comment on the Draft Convention 3. If you would rather not register your interest you can comments privately to Stephen Mason The consultation phase will close on the 30 th September 2016, and the final Convention, reflecting the comments, observations, alterations and additions of the people who contribute to the document, will be published in the Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review in the autumn of Please share your own cyber prosecution materials relating to electronic evidence (any language) on the GPEN forum. Please note: you need to be logged into the IAP website using your IAP username and password to access the forum. Greatest influencers This month s interview is with Stephen Mason, a Barrister based in the United Kingdom and a recognised authority on electronic signatures and digital evidence. He has assisted governments in China, the Middle-East, Central America, and businesses in continental Europe and Africa, including the Corporation of London, the Ministry of Justice of the United Arab Emirates and Trinidad and Tobago. In his spare time Stephen enjoys good food, art, literature, poetry, music and architecture. 1. Can you tell me about your career? After leaving school in 1972 and working in a bank for 6 months, I joined the British Army. I was an Ammunition Technician [including bomb disposal], and served in the UK (and Armagh in 1976), Cyprus and Belize. I left the army to take a degree in History and Educational Philosophy. I subsequently took the City University one year course to qualify to be a lawyer and then took the Vocational Course for the Bar at the Inns of Court School of Law, before being called to the Bar in

7 2. How did you come up with the idea of developing a convention on Electronic Evidence? I have undertaken a great deal of training of judges and lawyers in electronic evidence across the world, especially with the Academy of European Law in Europe. More recently, participants have asked if a Convention on Electronic Evidence was being considered by the United Nations or the Council of Europe. To my knowledge, neither body are considering such a Convention, so I eventually thought that it might be useful to develop such a Convention with the help of judges and lawyers across the world. I developed an outline Convention and hope that others will join in to improve the first draft. I appreciate this is a private initiative, but sometimes private initiatives help. The aim is to help judges and lawyers to more fully understand the topic. I have two books on the topic, but they are not widely read, although I have plans to put Electronic Evidence online for free for the 4th edition - as I have done with the Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review. 3. What difference will the Convention on Electronic Evidence make to the prosecution of Cybercrime throughout the world? We have to think about electronic evidence in a different way to paper and other more familiar forms of evidence. In particular, we have to think about the authentication of electronic evidence and the need to encourage governments to permit the faster movement of evidence across jurisdictional boundaries. Mutual Legal Assistance can be slow, and prosecuting authorities might give up with a prosecution because the evidence is not forthcoming from the requested state. Such a Convention might encourage a positive change. 4. What are the challenges that face you as you try to establish a Convention on Electronic Evidence? Ensuring the text does not clash with national laws, and drafting in such a way as to encourage states to alter domestic law in a way that helps with the admission and authentication of electronic evidence. 5. Is there anything we can do as prosecutors, to help the development of a Convention on Electronic Evidence? If prosecutors are willing to illustrate the practical problems and offer some solutions, that will be very helpful. I appreciate that drafting such a Convention at the international level between governments needs to include political considerations. I do not wish to make light of this aspect of negotiations, because it is important. However, given that we now live in a networked world, and people do horrible things online, I think it is important to encourage politicians and commercial legal entities to understand that the flow of electronic evidence between prosecutors across legal boundaries is important for a number of reasons: the successful prosecution of people that have done something seriously wrong and where they have caused loss, harm and distress to innocent 7

8 victims, and for the social stability of nation states. Finally, I have no experience of prosecutions and the practical issues that accompany the obtaining evidence. For this reason, if prosecutors are willing to help set out problems and suggest solutions in the exercise, that might be a step forward for everyone. 6. What are your hopes for the future of global prosecution of Cybercrime? That global commercial legal entities take legitimate requests by prosecutors seriously and offer up electronic evidence, rather than ignoring requests. You can contribute to the Convention on Electronic Evidence by visiting - or if you would rather respond in a private capacity then you can Stephen Mason. You can find out more about Stephen Mason by visiting his website - Events Glimpse into the Dark Web Date: 8 th June 2016, Belfast; 10 th June 2016 London; 13 th June 2016, Birmingham Place: United Kingdom An event for child protection professionals which investigates new and emerging threats, the dark net, grooming, radicalisation, sexualisation and gang affiliation. Visit the Glimpse website for more information 11 th Annual Symposium on Information Assurance (ASIA 16) Date: 8 th 9 th June 2016 Place: Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York City, United States of America Visit the Annual Symposium on Information Assurance website for more details The 4th International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics (ICCCF) Technically Co-Sponsored by IEEE Date: 12 th 14 th June 2016 Place: Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada Find out more about the conference at: 8

9 Specialisation Course for Junior Prosecutors International Criminal Law and International Cooperation in Penal Matters: Theoretical and Practical Questions This course includes a session on Cybercrime presented by Esther George. Date: 4 th 15 th July 2016 Place: Siracusa, Italy Find out more about the conference at Protecting Privacy - Domestic and International Criminal Justice Responses to Crimes against Personal Privacy and the Balance between Individuals Privacy and Collective Security Date: 24 th 28 th July 2016 Place: Halifax World Trade and Convention Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Conference will be run by the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law. Visit the Privacy Conference website. Cyber Security Conference Date: 25 th 28 th July 2016 Place: New York, United States of America The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Fordham University will host the Sixth International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS 2016) on July 25-28, 2016, in New York City. ICCS is an unparalleled opportunity for global leaders in cyber threat analysis, operations, research, and law enforcement to coordinate their efforts to create a more secure world. Find out more at the conference website. LawTech Europe Congress 2016 Date: 7 th 8 th November 2016 Place: Brussels, Belgium Find out more at Register for the conference: We have a special deal with Law Tech Europe which means that GPEN members can have a special 30% discount if they use the code: LTEC-3TCR 9

10 International Conference on Cyber-law, Cybercrime Date: 17 th and 18 th November 2016 Place: New Delhi, India Call for Papers - Submit Your Entries At: info@cyberlawcybercrime.com Find out more about this conference at: If you know of any conferences or events you think would be useful for Cybercrime colleagues around the world please post them to the news section of the GPEN forum. You can find more information in the Events section of GPEN. Please note that to view this information you need to be logged into the website with your International Association of Prosecutors username and password. Find out how to become a member of the IAP. This newsletter is published by the Global Prosecutors E-Crime Network (GPEN) part of the International Association of Prosecutors - Hartogstraat 13, The Hague, The Netherlands 10