By M.C. Linthoingambee
The world is on a fast forward pace thanks to technological development but along with this have come its co-related crimes. The amount of cyber crimes being registered each day are increasing and while several countries do not even have existing legislation to deal with this area, many who are victimized with these natures of crimes has lesser aid and measures to protect themselves. While in India, we have no standing legislations to stand tall in protection of this valuation we have our very own Information Technology Act. There have been so many possibilities over the past few years from kids in their teen robbing a bank online to college students robbing ATM booths showing that we have suddenly become the victims of our own inventions. With the coming of the internet we see more and more results of this by product from computer crimes, e-crimes, etc. Several of the cyber crimes which are existing today are the existence of credit card frauds, cyber pornography, sale of illegal articles using online e-commerce from narcotics and so forth, with defamation and character slander being something that cannot be easily prevented but which can get out of control. While solving and aiding crimes existed in a more manual nature we know have the perfect tool of getting away with crimes in the medium of forging and hiding identities. There are also various computer viruses which can easily eat away our hard-drives. For the measure of installing anti-virus we still find a number of viable threats while scanning for virus in our computer programs.
We see several persons dictating the art of harassment while releasing obscene videos and pictures of a person all through the internet; we have seen how this edited obscenity becomes a huge area of scandal, we have seen how unwanted spams and messages containing virus are sent. All these are not merely acts of say but a rather prevalent practice going on in our surroundings. The idea of spreading the fixture of internet was to gain a wider audience to sharing a common news or idea in the beginning whereas today, we are left with the question of control. The several Information Technology Departments placed in different sectors of a state, workplace, school, etc have come up with various firewalls to contain the mishaps of cyber crimes in a deserted or isolated cell but the reality is all these still fail to function properly. Imagine getting your Facebook account hacked by an unknown person and how we nearly end up losing a social identity. Imagine somebody else using your credit card details for his own benefit and drawing your money. The truth is we all end up losing something or other if we are faced with the touch of a cyber wrong. In a normal circumstance, we could have send it the military troops to bring seizure of such crimes we cannot do so and while we cannot send an army to control these crimes we have come up with other measures but the reality is a hacker often outsmarts us before. In order to determine the identities we have come up with digital signatures, public key cryptography and several other feasible corrections. The international initiative came with the Convention on Cyber crimes held with the objective of combating cyber crimes.
Should the internet be regulated? It is now open to all. In the beginning it was confined to the rules of the American military establishment and slowly broadening the aspect we have reached a point where every country and very age group has its service. Every person may browse through the World Wide Web day and night. There are no terms of secrecy and unraveled mystery that lay hidden on the site. Whereas we are more vulnerable to accessing harmful content, offensive content one can only control the end users with the installation of firewalls determining the type of audience who may be using the internet even the determination of identity is still a unbiased solution and yet to conquer. We must also not exempt the cases of inflicting the possibilities of financial scams, online gambling, cyber stalking which are areas that are less discoverable through a general outlook. We can call for the society to protect itself by enforcing the criminal law to apply for these online activities with rigorous measures. While most government, politicians and internet service providers favor the idea of regulation some may less agree. It can be viewed as a counter to our right to freedom of expression. We have also seen results of some leaked videos becoming communal in intent and spreading the idea of inserting hate crimes in various communities, we have also seen people getting arrested for several post on social network sites. They may be truthful or less favourable but since they are casual benefactors to a greater crime they must be prevented. We cannot nearly put the blame on the government for every action taken on the internet.
Certainly we can only work our way to controlling the increasing number of cyber crimes by rechecking and cross checking the hyper links while making money transactions, blocking and reporting of harmful sites. We can’t be playing blame games on the internet while all such above have occurred we have to thank the world for its invention because the general idea of crossing territories could never have been acquired sitting miles away. We have to say business can be conducted from one conference room to another in a different country. We are merely the end users at the end of the line who thinks less and use more.