I was listening to This Week in Tech yesterday and something caught my attention. The panel was discussing a cybercrime treaty that the USA has recently ratified.

According to the EFF, the treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries’ ‘cybercrime’ laws — even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments.

That wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the example situation Cory Doctorow used to explain when this clause might be used:

If you posted something that was critical of Singaporean government — and that’s illegal in Singapore — and they wanted to prosecute you in the United States for it…

(Cory was, of course, here last September as part of the Singapore Writer’s Festival.)

So what I find amusing about it is that Singapore was the first thing that came to Cory’s mind. Not that I’m entirely surprised: we are ranked 141 in the world for freedom of speech. But it does say a bit about how others perceive Singapore.