A group of the world’s industrialized nations issued a largely meaningless statement on Monday arguing that member states should not "conduct or support" stealing of intellectual property "or other confidential business information." The G20 Communiqué was issued as part of the G20 meeting held this week in Antalya, Turkey.

It’s important to note that the statement, which has been dubbed an "anti-hacking" bill, has zero enforcement mechanisms to speak of.

This statement is likely squarely aimed at China, which has long been accused of running state-sponsored operations to penetrate, steal, and exploit American and European commercial, government, and military data. Washington and Beijing signed a similar "anti-hacking" agreement in September 2015. But as recently as last month, CrowdStrike, a computer security analysis firm, said that there are no signs of China abating.

The G20 Communiqué also notes that "all states in ensuring the secure use of ICTs, should respect and protect the principles of freedom from unlawful and arbitrary interference of privacy, including in the context of digital communications."

The word "unlawful" here is key since member states generally view online snooping conducted by their own law enforcement and military agencies to be wholly authorized within their respective laws. The communiqué also makes no mention of the fact that some member states, including Russia and China, engage in wholesale sophisticated monitoring of their domestic Internet . Meanwhile, the United States uses various covert programs to capture metadata and content both at home and abroad.

For every American that worries about the National Security Agency’s domestic overreach in the United States, we can take at least some solace that what we’re arguing about isn’t quite as bad as the deep packet inspection-enabled system known as SORM, which was put on every Russian ISP in the late 1990s. By 2000, Russia released a public document entitled "Information Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation" (2000), essentially codifying what Russian domestic intelligence had been doing for a few years.