Cyber Laws: Do they hold any water?

April 5th, 2010 → 1:01 am @    

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Cyber Law is the domain which is intersection of technology, risk, and law. The IT Act 2000 has done a very good job at somewhat restricting the cyber crimes that takes place every hour in India. I suppose we ourselves are to be blamed for the loopholes that this Act contains. According to a study, the hackers try to target those circumstances or situations that are not mentioned in the IT Act 2000 (amended in 2008), because they know that they can get away with it very easily. Somebody rightly said “bad news travels fast” and so is true with crime. The main reason for us being at the receiving end most of the time is due to the legal literacy levels which our population has.

cyber-law

Internet/ world wide web/ cyberspace is not a property of a single nation per se but rather it’s a space which every country shares. The law at its nascent stage is presumed as a wall that will stop crimes that take place all over the world, but then why it hasn’t been successful? That’s because we don’t know how to get into scheme of things or how to get a single legislation enacted which could govern every act of cyber crime around globe at the same time. The logic is quite clear, when cyberspace does not belong to a single nation then how a national level legislation would be efficient in curbing cyber crime?

There is limited awareness of computer security among domestic as well as business users. The systems which aren’t protected sufficiently are the soft targets. A study reveals that although 75% had a firewall but 86% of them did not follow the recommendations to update their systems regularly. Sometimes we dig huge holes for ourselves and fall in it easily.

Cyber law is a generic term, which denotes all aspects, issues and the legal consequences over the Internet, the World Wide Web and cyber space. India is the 12th nation in the world that has cyber legislation apart from countries like the US, Singapore, France, Malaysia and Japan.

But the major issue that needs to be addressed is to decide what the final limit is. What I mean to say here is that to what extent we can tolerate in terms of being liberal.India is emerging superpower and a leader in outsourcing. This industry faces the worst blow when it comes to cyber crime.

If we want to see our country shining lifelong then the lawmakers of this country should take very strict measures while enacting these type of very important laws or the day isnt’ very far when India will start losing its sheen.

Whatever the bigger problem may be but it’s duty of each one of us to keep ourselves updated and try to update others as well because somewhere or other we are also a part of the network that the hackers or cyber criminals are targeting at.

[image credits]

For Further Reading:

  1. Cyber Squatting and its Legal Position

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He is an engineer and is presently working with Oriental Group of Institutes

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