The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 poses serious threats to Internet freedom, the right to privacy and other essential civil liberties including the freedom of speech, expression, and the press.
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by: Kabataan Partylist
Petition Letter
Greetings,
We, the youth, journalists, activists, bloggers, and netizens of the Philippines express our outright condemnation to the passage of Republic Act No. 10175, or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which poses serious threats to Internet freedom, the right to privacy and other essential civil liberties including the freedom of speech, expression, and the press.
While the Cybercrime Law was supposedly enacted to ward off hacking, identity theft, data manipulation, cybersex and other nefarious activities in the Internet, the insertion of provisions regarding online libel and vague sections on data collection and sanctions have transformed the legislation into an online censorship law.
We express our highest condemnation to the Bicameral Conference, especially to Sen. Vicente Sotto III, for inserting the online libel provisions, which are not present even in the 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime penned by the Council of Europe, which was the basis for RA 10175.
