Are India’s Cyber Laws adequate? What can India do to make it work

A set of laws monitoring and governing the activities taking place on the cyber world are Cyber Laws. Cyber crime is fairly contemporary and there is very little that is being done to combat it in India. There are too many loopholes in the set of laws that were anyways introduced very late. The structured law for cyber crime is quite inadequate to address to the present situation. Most of the officials enforcing law don’t have the comprehension and understanding of the computers and Internet and hence it becomes an impossible task to monitor and fight cyber crime.

The current law needs to be revised and revamped by lawyers who have knowledge of the cyber space so as to erase the existing loopholes in the present laws. Presently all cyber crimes come under the purview of civil offence whereas they should be under criminal offence. The Indian cyber laws do not cover cyber defamation, cyber harassment and cyber theft. The laws need to be stricter and ambiguity and the vagueness in the definitions need to be substituted with precisely defined laws. Also, all law enforcing agencies catering to cyber crime need to get proper training in the sphere of cyber forensics.

Eights years have passed since the Information Technology Law was passed and in these eight years there has been a lot of advancement in the technology. Though it is stupid to even consider that laws will change with the pace of changes in technology, but there are few areas which require amendment and attention.

All of us receive unsolicited bulk emails also known as Spam. Even though we just see it as a mere nuisance it has a deeper under lying economic concern. The time that is wasted in checking and dealing with spam mail can be put to constructive economic use. On individual level the time spent may be mere 5 minutes but on a macro level it does account to lot of potential time being unutilized. Though there are some ways of dealing with spam technically but even they aren’t successful and hence laws are required to deal with spamming. Spamming hasn’t been addressed in the ITA. In Australia the law for spam is so strict that spammers can be penalized up to 1.1 million dollars on a daily basis.

Phishing has been defined as “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication” by Wikipedia.com. This happens when an internet user enter personal and financial data on websites. There is no law addressing to the problem of phishing.

Pornography has been addressed but the law doesn’t specify what content will be regarded as obscene. Also, publishing pornographic content has been stated as a crime but viewing is not a crime. A serious concern like child pornography has been missed in the law.

There are shortcomings in the ITA 2000 and they need to be addressed to as soon as possible as the rate of cyber crime is growing and there is very little that is being done to check it.