Some ITU member countries are pressing for changes to treaty...

Press on Thursday quoted ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure urging BlackBerry’s Canadian manufacturer Research in Motion to give law enforcement agencies around the world access to its customer data. Toure didn’t offer advice to the company, said an ITU spokesman who sat in on the interview. Toure said cybersecurity is an increasingly worrying issue, she said. Toure said governments and the private sector will have to cooperate more closely on the problem, she said. However, a group of 16 Arab countries during an October policy-setting conference wants to expand ITU’s basic mandate and treaty instruments into “ensuring cybersecurity.” A separate 2012 ITU treaty conference may change what telecom issues countries cooperate on, the U.S. executive said. The treaty doesn’t deal with IP-based traffic, the executive said, but some countries could press for rules on ways governments should share data. The idea of updating an ITU treaty to deal with data sharing may sound “immediately seductive,” she said. Proponents would then suggest that governments agreeing to the treaty would have to cooperate, she said. Companies in those countries would be required by the government to comply, she said. The problem is often how they go about it, she said, referring to the possibility that a government may want to go into corporate data for a financial services company. National rules vary widely, the source said. Most privacy commissioners want very strict limits on what can be shared across borders, she said. Justice and increasingly national security officials are now entering the fray, she said.