Virtual Crime: How safe are you in Cyberspace?
Aman Malik
"Ten minutes after the first mail went out of Patrice’s computer, forty more people have unknowingly distributed it to their friends and contacts. Half an hour later 800 have done so. By the time-Patrice phones technical support at his internet service provider to say that he thinks something might be wrong with his connection, the mail containing what will come to be known as ‘first variant Leela virus’ or Leela01 has made its way to over 17,000 hard drives around the world."
Excerpt from Hari Kunzru’s Transmission
"But Leela01 is a figment is someone’s fertile imagination," you would want to conclude, and sure, your opinion would not be challenged. However, try and scratch the surface a little and the reasons for such ‘doomsday imaginings’ become clear. Cyber crime is a reality that we, the inhabitants of a ‘connected’ world, must acknowledge and indeed contend with.
And again, it goes beyond just cyber crime. Inextricably linked to the issue, is a whole gamut of others: from the ‘architecture’ of the Internet to its psychology and from cyber sex to the ‘chat room culture’ that prevails all over the virtual world.
Let us first begin with how the law defines cyber crime. Says Rodney. D. Ryder, a New Delhi based Internet Law expert, "There is no universally accepted general definition of cyber crime, and no national legislation (in India) provides us with a definition or explicitly employs the term."
‘Cyber crime’ comprises two overlapping domains. The first is illegal activities directed at or perpetrated through the use of computers. This can include crimes via the Internet such as: willful damage to computer systems or networks, unlawful access to or interference with the operation of computer systems, transmitting offensive or illegal content and committing5 fraud or other offences through the use of the medium.
The second related area is the protection of information. This has been a concern of legal systems from well before the introduction of modern technologies of mass-communication, but is clearly brought into focus by the development of global networked computer-based information media such as the World Wide Web and the Internet. Principally legal measures related to the protection of information from unlawful use, distribution or exploitation includes intellectual property laws, privacy laws, laws relating to secrecy and national security, and laws relating to unfair commercial advantage.
The nature of cyber crime and the necessary legislation required to counter it, depend to quite an extent, on the psychology of its users (as also of content creators). Here, parallels may clearly be drawn between human psychology and the psychology of the Internet.
If one tries to delve slightly deeper into human psychology, one would find that there are four constraints on human behavior and freedom. They are: the law, norms (cultural and social), markets and architecture. In fact, architecture is as much a regulator in ‘cyberspace’ as it is in real space.
Take Napoleon III for instance. He wanted fewer revolutionaries, as fewer the number of revolutionaries, the easier it becomes for him to keep his political dominance over his empire. So he rebuilt Paris with wide streets, making it harder for revolutionaries to hide. In much the same fashion, architecture, or rather the proverbial ‘code’ is the first aspect of the virtual world that ‘cyber criminals’ seek to alter.
However now the law has begun using this very aspect of the Internet to its advantage in a bid to preempt the nefarious intent of an ever-growing community of ‘cyber criminals’. The emphasis on anti-circumvention legislation is the result. Core architectural features, such as TCP/IP, the data-shipping protocols of the Internet, are quite often on the ‘target list’ of cyber criminals, who seek to make alterations to such protocols so as to ‘customize’ these to suit their designs. Quips Ryder, "Technologists build such protocols for the sake of functionality. Lawyers look at them and notice certain features which they then make use of, in order to make laws more effective."
The term ‘cyber crime’ is often wrongly affixed to a computer-related crime. One has to, in the first instance, be extremely cautious about the nomenclature used. Computers and crime have a distinct relationship based on the circumstances and use of the machine (and the medium). There is a distinction, for instance, between computer law (the law of the machine) and Internet law (the law of the medium).
The following categorization, as regards Internet crime, is worth considering:
• Computer as the target of a criminal act
• Computer as an instrumentality of the crime
• Computers as incidental to the crime
• Crime enhanced by computers
While transmission of unsolicited pornographic and otherwise salacious content and spamming might fall in the first category, Internet hacking might fall into either of the first two categories. The third category however, deals with cyber stalking and related issues. Cyber sex and online pornography are usually grouped in the last category.
What then is the profile of such people who might be the most vulnerable to any form of cyber crime, or might even be partaking in it? While researching on this subject, this correspondent conducted an e-mail survey in which a representative group of people from all walks of life was mailed a questionnaire. The aim of this exercise was to ascertain their activities on the Internet and the amount of time that each one of them spent online each day.
Manas Gupta, a software engineering student in Singapore, an uppity teenager by any count, spends close to 10 hours online everyday. While most of his time is spent "casually surfing and chatting," he admits that he does download a lot of "awesome stuff" (aka: pornographic content). In fact, Manas fits the bill when it comes to defining the median profile of an Internet user. Comments Pavan Anand Kumar, who is Vice President Operations of a leading IT company, "Trends indicate that teenagers with college education are the most prominent users of the Internet." He further points out that it is this group that is also at maximum risk when it comes to cyber crime.
Most respondents seemed to agree that they were, to some degree, addicted to the Internet. Anantha Narayanan, who works with a finance company, claimed that since he accesses the Net primarily from his workplace, he misses "its presence" on weekends. Clinical psychologists are fast coming to a conclusion that Internet addiction is indeed a medical condition linked to cyber crime as people addicted to the Internet tend to spend unusually long hours on the Internet and such people may either be potential victims of or indeed perpetrators of such crimes.
Now that we have defined, to a respectable degree of precision, what the term ‘cyber crime’ actually entails and have, to a similar degree, ascertained the typical profile of not just a potential ‘cyber criminal’ but also of a potential victim of such a crime, it would not be unwise to discuss the question of the adequacy of laws to deal with such criminal offences.
Countries across the world can be categorised according to whether they have:
(i) Basic criminal and commercial laws;
(ii) A developed system of intellectual property laws; and
(iii) Legislation directed specifically at computers and electronic commerce.
Every country may be observed to fall within one or more of these categories, with most satisfying the second category and having made some progress towards the third. Whether the existing legal system in any country can adequately address cyber crime or not, depends on the precise scope and interaction of its criminal, commercial, intellectual property and computer-related laws.
The Internet has tested the limits of regulation, prompting some to declare ‘independence’ and yet others to declare it beyond the limits of governance. As time passes, one aspect of governance is clearly visible: the will of governments to be seen and ‘felt’ on the Internet. With each passing day ‘cyber policing’ is slowly but surely gaining fresh ground in its quest to overwhelm the cyber criminal. However, having said this, one must admit that the community of cyber criminals (which, needless to say, is fairly well networked) is using newer and better technological tools, as indeed stupendous ingenuity, to remain ahead of the law in this game of one-upmanship.
It is high time that adequate measures are taken to stall the march of the often, innocuous looking cyber criminal, before he conquers humankind’s last refuge.
The author is a student. Contact: amanmalik000@hotmail.com