The most important treaty you've never heard about

Is right here. It's a treaty that may be ratified by the Senate in the next few days. The administration is putting pressure on them to pass it. The "cybercrime" treaty would obligate the U.S. to help enforce other countries internet laws, even if such laws do not exist in the U.S.

To paint a picture of what this means, Vladimir "See my Soul" Putin, can ask our FBI to track down Russians who are criticizing him online but from the U.S. It obligates us to respect the censorship laws of countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, etc. In the event that you didn't know, those nations don't exactly have a free press.

I understand the administration thinks this treaty will assist us in tracking terrorists, but at what cost? At the risk of sounding naive, what happened to that vision of the "shining city on a hill"? When did tracking potential terrorists become more important than supporting freedom in countries that desperately need it? And if America doesn't support them, who will?

Sometimes I wonder why I vote Republican. Then I see that the main opposition to this treaty is coming from conservatives and I remember.

Edit: After further research, it appears that the actual text isn't as bad as those articles make it out to be. The treaty, while a somewhat blatant step in the direction of world government, and a far cry from perfect, does make an attempt to reach an international definition on what constitutes a cyber crime. So our FBI would be used to chase down violators of whatever the international consensus is, rather than a specific countries individual laws. While better than initially thought, it's still bad news if you're wary of UN-style internationalism.

Oh, and it was just ratified.