Saturday, Feb 05, 2005
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Chennai
Karthik Subramanian
In recent times, there has been a spate of arrests all over the country in crimes relating to invasion of privacy and tarnishing the image of public figures. Most of the arrested have been youths, who are generally not aware of the laws and technologies in place to track down cyber crimes. The most recent one in Chennai this week involved the arrest of a 21-year-old web designer from Adyar on the charge of posting obscene messages involving two women in an online public forum. The Cyber Crime Cell was able to track down the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer that was used to post the message on the World Wide Web. Once the web designer was tracked down, the police tried to ascertain the motive: the accused had reportedly not been able to return the money he borrowed from the complainant. When the latter insulted him, the youth decided to exact revenge by posting the phone numbers of the complainant's mother and sister with a message that they were open to soliciting. The police are likely to frame charges under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act for publishing obscene messages on the Internet and under Sections 469 (Forgery with an intention of harming reputation) and Section 504 (Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) of the Indian Penal Code. If convicted, the youth might have to go to jail for a minimum of two years. Last year, in a similar case, another youth, Suhas Katti, was sentenced to undergo two years' rigorous imprisonment after he had posted defamatory messages about a divorcee in a yahoo message group.
Cracking the case
The biggest problem in cyber crime cases is securing evidence. The moment the person, who posted the obscene message becomes aware of the police case, he can simply log on to the Internet, delete the message and walk away. Since most of the servers are situated abroad, it becomes difficult for enforcement agencies to get archived details. In the case of the web designer, it so happened that he had posted the message in two online fora but removed it from one of them. Na. Vijayashankar, one of the city's well-known cyber law experts, offers a simple solution. He has created a Cyber Evidence Archival System, where he will act as an independent observer and archive the webpage at the time of filing the complaint. He will then prepare a legal document that could be used as proof in the court. (More details about the archival system are available on www.ceac4india.com.)
Sense of security
One of the factors that embolden people to post defamatory messages or images in the Internet is what the cyber crime police and cyber law experts refer to as a "false sense" of absolute power that the medium might appear to offer. "When you sit in front of a computer with no one next to you, it might feel too safe to do anything you want," a police officer said, trying to explain the spate of cyber crimes. In December, a youth, apparently inspired by a Tamil film in which the protagonist takes on government departments to weed out corruption, sent out e-mails to government officials saying that bombs would explode in all government-run liquor shops. He sent out the e-mails from a cyber cafe thinking it would ensure his safety. Though the police have been able to nab the e-mail prankster, there are still a lot of concerns about cyber cafes. In Maharashtra, for example, police have sent out instructions to Internet browsing centres that they must allow customers to avail of the service only after producing photo identification cards such as a licence or voter ID. In Karnataka, the government has issued notifications to all cyber cafes where it pushes the envelope further: people without photo ID cards will be photographed by the cyber cafe. These photos will be archived for future references.
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