"Our primary concern is that there's no dual criminality within the mutual assistance provisions," said Danny O'Brien, activism coordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The U.S. is now obliged to investigate and monitor French Internet crimes, say, and France is obliged to obey America's requests to spy on its citizens, for instance--even if those citizens are under no suspicion for crimes on the statute books of their own country."

In many respects, the treaty simply reflects existing U.S. law, and many in the software industry applaud the tools it provides to crack down on copyright infringement. But other apsects of the treaty may go too far in sacrificing the privacy interests of computer users.

In a letter to senators last summer (click here for PDF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center attacked the treaty for offering only "vague and weak" privacy protections. One section, for example, would force participating nations to have laws forcing individuals to disclose their decryption keys so that law enforcement could seize data for investigations, EPIC wrote.

Even conservatives -- usually great friends of law enforcement -- are troubled by what "liberals" could do under the treaty.

Distrust of "leftists," "internationalists," and "Eurocrats" is palpable. "Even worse, the Cybercrime Treaty is open to all nations to ratify," writes one commentator. "That means a future leftist President could even allow Communist China to sign on to the treaty and direct U.S. law enforcement to investigate Chinese dissidents, even Americans, based in the United States."

Sure, because the left hates human rights and privacy, and it wants nothing more than to spy on ordinary Americans who haven't committed a crime. Oh, wait.

Or again, "the treaty could allow European or even Chinese Communist agents to electronically spy on innocent Americans." The Europeans, as the Convention's drafters, come in for special flogging--"greater control over what we do on the Internet is the goal of the Eurocrats so enamored with global government."

The Justice Department claims that treaty allows the U.S. to reject any request that would violate the U.S. Constitution, but this might provide small comfort since the Justice Department has evinced a limited appreciation of the Constitution's protective reach.