Monday, February 18, 2002		Article

THE evolution of the Net has been vastly beneficial to all hues of people from businessmen to students. There is something on the Net for every one. Transnational and transcontinental boundaries have vanished. In the Indian context, the Information Technology (IT) revolution has generated gargantuan proportions of business and made India a force to reckon with. That is the rosy side of the coin! Like in most cases there is a flip side too. The Net has also given birth to a myriad of new age crimes involving complex and technical issues that were hitherto unknown to us. Welcome to the world of cyber crimes!

Cyber-crimes can be perpetrated in a variety of ways. If you are a regular Netizen chances are rather high that you have been a victim of the same assuming, of course, that you were not the perpetrator to start with!

Legitimate organizations both in the private sector as well as the public sector depend on an array of communication media to keep themselves informed and new age technology helps them do it in a faster and secure way. The same technology provides fertile ground for criminal elements to enhance their activities. The inherent borderless nature of the Net makes the problem more complex. A person sitting in Eritrea while using an American server may hatch a criminal conspiracy with a person sitting in India or may just put up an encrypted message on his Website. In effect what it means is that although conventional law may recognise communication for furtherance of a criminal conspiracy by means of computer networking as illegal, yet it lacks effective means to implement the same.

There is credible evidence of how the Net is being rampantly used to facilitate criminal activities like organised gambling, money laundering, drug trafficking etc. A site, www.e-gold.com, is rumored to be a Website where money laundering is facilitated in none too discreet a manner. There is no dearth of online gambling and lottery sites. The September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre was supervised from thousands of miles away by various persons in different geographical locations. Communication in furtherance of criminal conspiracies is a crime as per the Indian Penal Code but the use of encryption technology may place criminal communications beyond the reach of law enforcement.

The Net makes available large amounts of information reproduction and dissemination of which is a relatively simple affair. Digital technology permits perfect reproduction and easy dissemination of print, graphics, sound, and multimedia combinations. In contrast the person who actually puts in the man-hours may not be able to commercially exploit his work. Even in India copyright violation is a big issue. It is most apparent in the entertainment industry where original tunes etc. are rampantly copied without any hindrance. New Age Technology is a fertile ground for such plagiarism. What is most surprising is the lack of awareness amongst artists as to their rights. The Information Technology Act does touch upon the issue of copyright in Section 43 (b). The Section prohibits downloading, copying or extracting any data without the permission of the owner of the computer, computer system or computer network. The penalty for violating the law could run up to Rs 1 crore. Whether it will deter people all over the world from violating the copyright in the absence of any instrumentality of the state, which can traverse territorial boundaries, is the moot question.

There are a few who will doubt the advantages the Internet has bestowed on us but the same will vouch for its very evident nuisance value at times. The medium is the most popular forum for publishing pornographic material. The Information Technology (IT) Act expressly prohibits publishing and transmission of any material, which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interests. In one of the first cases of its kind in India the accused made available on the Internet the telephone number and address of a woman whose husband was previously his business partner, along with defamatory statements about the woman. In another case a Class X student from Delhi used photographs from the school magazine morphed them with pictures from a pornographic site and made available nude pictures of his female classmates and teachers on the Net.

Tamil Nadu witnessed its first "cyber crime" a few days back when a prominent doctor from Chennai was arrested for publishing sexually explicit material of his patients and other youth on Websites run by him The material was sold in more than 23 countries. If convicted he could face punishment for a maximum of five years in prison and fine up to Rs 5 lakh under the IT Act besides various other offences of criminal intimidation, blackmailing, outraging the modesty of women etc. This case is going to be an acid test for much needed judicial precedence in cyber laws. Tracking cyber criminals is not an easy task and conventional investigation methods are of little use. The Chennai police overcame this difficulty by hiring Information Security Company. The Company used special software to gather evidence against the accused. The police has seized the computer containing the evidence. There are a lot of queries being raised in the legal fraternity as to genuineness of electronic evidence in the wake of the Tehelka scandal. What is to be seen is whether the evidence made available in electronic form will hold in court. The courts will probably need to consult technical experts to prove the genuineness of electronic evidence gathered by the company. The other big problem with electronic evidence is keeping it secure for long durations. The American law enforcement agencies found this out the hard way. They gathered credible evidence on the computer of the accused to link him to a cyber crime and promptly seized the computer. Would you believe me if I told you that the guy got away scot-free?!! Well yes he did and no it was not because he was the son of a powerful politician. He outwitted the police by installing powerful magnetic coils in his door way and as the officials triumphantly walked out of his door all the information in the computer was permanently deleted! Well what would you call such a criminal? Charles Sobhraj of the Internet? Maybe…