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Cyber crime to be defined in IT Act amendment

HYDERABAD: The Union government, in its proposed Amendment Bill 2006 to the IT Act 2000, has made an effort to define cyber terrorism, child pornography spam and “phishing.”

The Bill, which seeks to address cyber crimes emerging from new technologies, is likely to be taken up by Parliament in the winter session.

Participating in a panel discussion on “Are we losing the battle against cyber crime?,” organised on the second day of the U.N.-sponsored Internet Governance Forum here on Thursday, Gulshan Rai, Director General in the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), said the amendments dealt with data security and privacy, identity theft and cyber terrorism.

Mr. Rai called for international collaboration between governments and organisations to tackle cyber security issues. There was need to exchange information without any hindrance among the computer emergency response teams across the globe to tackle cyber criminals.

“The challenge is huge for us to train our police and judicial officers to collect and analyse potential evidence. We are working in this direction, with the help public-private partnership,” he said.

The proliferation of IT infrastructure with supercomputers to hand-held devices and interconnecting networks and transactions increased the threat perception and also the variety of attacks.

R. Chandrasekhar, Special Secretary of ICT Ministry, said crime and criminality in any developed society were dealt with through the force of law. But legislative measures were bogged down by problems of jurisdiction, geographical boundaries, and also by slow adaptability in a fast-changing technological environment.

Other speakers felt that the cyber criminals were always one step ahead of the enforcing agencies and the borderless nature of the crimes were raising jurisdictional issues.

Jayantha Fernando of Sri Lanka said the law enforcement process was often behind technology. He sought harmonisation of cyber security laws among different countries.

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