Success in any field of human activity leads to crime that needs mechanisms to control it.Legal provisions should provide assurance to users, empowerment to law enforcementagencies and deterrence to criminals. The law is as stringent as its enforcement. Crime is nolonger limited to space, time or a group of people. Cyber space creates moral, civil andcriminal wrongs. It has now given a new way to express criminal tendencies. Back in 1990,less than 100,000 people were able to log on to the Internet worldwide. Now around 500million people are hooked up to surf the net around the globe.Until recently, many information technology (IT) professionals lacked awareness of andinterest in the cyber crime phenomenon. In many cases, law enforcement officers havelacked the tools needed to tackle the problem; old laws didn’t quite fit the crimes beingcommitted, new laws hadn’t quite caught up to the reality of what was happening, and therewere few court precedents to look to for guidance. Furthermore, debates over privacy issueshampered the ability of enforcement agents to gather the evidence needed to prosecute thesenew cases.
Finally, there was a certain amount of antipathy—or at the least, distrust—between the two most important players in any effective fight against cyber crime:
lawenforcement agencies and computer professionals. Yet close cooperation between the twois crucial if we are to control the cyber crime problem and make the Internet a safe “place”for its users.Law enforcement personnel understand the criminal mindset and know the basics ofgathering evidence and bringing offenders to justice. IT personnel understand computersand networks, how they work, and how to track down information on them. Each has half ofthe key to defeating the cyber criminal.IT professionals need good definitions of cybercrime in order to know when (and what) toreport to police, but law enforcement agencies must have statutory definitions of specificcrimes in order to charge a criminal with an offense. The first step in specifically definingindividual cybercrimes is to sort all the acts that can be considered cybercrimes intoorganized categories.
United Nations’ Definition of Cybercrime
Cybercrime spans not only state but national boundaries as well. Perhaps we should look tointernational organizations to provide a standard definition of the crime. At the TenthUnited Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders, in aworkshop devoted to the issues of crimes related to computer networks, cybercrime wasbroken into two categories and defined thus:
a. Cybercrime in a narrow sense (computer crime): Any illegal behavior directed by meansof electronic operations that targets the security of computer systems and the data processedby them.
b. Cybercrime in a broader sense (computer-related crime): Any illegal behavior committedby means of, or in relation to, a computer system or network, including such crimes asillegal possession [and] offering or distributing information by means of a computer systemor network.Of course, these definitions are complicated by the fact that an act may be illegal in onenation but not in another.There are more concrete examples, including
i. Unauthorized access
ii Damage to computer data or programs
iii Computer sabotage
iv Unauthorized interception of communications
v Computer espionageThese definitions, although not completely definitive, do give us a good starting point—onethat has some international recognition and agreement—for determining just what we meanby the term cybercrime.
In Indian law, cyber crime has to be voluntary and willful, an act or omission that adverselyaffects a person or property. The IT Act provides the backbone for e-commerce and India’sapproach has been to look at e-governance and e-commerce primarily from the promotionalaspects looking at the vast opportunities and the need to sensitize the population to the2possibilities of the information age. There is the need to take in to consideration the securityaspects.In the present global situation where cyber control mechanisms are important we need topush cyber laws. Cyber Crimes are a new class of crimes to India rapidly expanding due toextensive use of internet. Getting the right lead and making the right interpretation are veryimportant in solving a cyber crime. The 7 stage continuum of a criminal case starts fromperpetration to registration to reporting, investigation, prosecution, adjudication andexecution. The system can not be stronger than the weakest page link in the chain. In India, thereare 30 million policemen to train apart from 12,000 strong Judiciary. Police in India aretrying to become cyber crime savvy and hiring people who are trained in the area. Eachpolice station in Delhi will have a computer soon which will be connected to the HeadQuarter.. The pace of the investigations however can be faster; judicial sensitivity andknowledge need to improve. Focus needs to be on educating the police and districtjudiciary. IT Institutions can also play a role in this area.


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