Canada lags in cybercrime laws

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

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SHOWWEI CHU
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER; With a file from Reuters
Thursday, December 14, 2000

Canada is a laggard in enacting laws to crack down on cybercrimes,
indicates a recent report by a United Nations-sponsored network of
Internet policy officials.

Canada has updated laws in only four of 10 categories covered by the
study from McConnell International, putting it in the same category as
Chile and Malaysia and lagging countries such as the United States,
Japan and the Phillipines.

But Canada is ahead of nearly two-thirds of the 52 countries surveyed
by McConnell.

Thirty-three nations have yet to update their criminal codes to deal
with offences against computers or networks, according to the
Washington-based consulting company.

Ten countries, including Canada, have enacted laws to address five or
fewer of the 10 types of offences at issue, while nine said they were
prepared to prosecute six types of offences or more.

"Governments need look at this," says Bruce McConnell, McConnell
International's president. "Ultimately, the threat is that some
countries could become havens for cybercrimes."

Cyberlaws, he says, are necessary because current laws don't cover
these types of crimes. "There's plenty of laws against breaking and
entering, but [they] may not include breaking and entering a computer
remotely," he says. "There's laws against stealing but [they] may not
cover stealing someone's property off [the] computer."

The survey was sent to 120 countries who are members of an electronic
network of government officials working on information technology and
Internet policies in their homeland.

The offences covered by the survey were: data-related crimes,
including interception, modification and theft; network tampering,
including interference and sabotage; crimes of access, including
hacking and virus distribution; and computer-associated crimes, such
as aiding and abetting cyber criminals, computer fraud and computer
forgery.

In Canada, the survey found laws that cover data modification, network
interference, network sabotage and unauthorized access. U.S. laws deal
with nine of the 10 crimes. Only the Philippines, where the
devastating "Love Bug" computer virus originated, had enacted laws to
cover all 10 types of crimes.

Updating laws to cover cyberspace is considered critical for
e-commerce to reach its full potential in a highly networked world.

The survey was published formally at a recent panel discussion on
addressing moves in Europe toward the first treaty aimed at building a
uniform framework for national cybercrime laws.

Earlier this month, the United States endorsed a proposed cybercrime
pact drafted by the 41-nation Council of Europe, which hopes to wrap
up the drafting process this month after more than a decade of work.

"Left unchallenged, computer crime poses a serious threat to the
health and safety of our citizens, and may stifle the Internet's power
as a tool to communicate, engage in commerce, and expand people's
educational opportunities around the globe," the U.S. Justice
Department said in a Dec. 1 posting on its cybercrime Web site,
cybercrime.gov.

The McConnell survey queried Internet policy officials from Albania to
Zimbabwe on the network it runs for the U.N. Working Group on
Informatics, an ad hoc panel under the Economic and Social Council.

The study began after the Philippines, citing inadequate laws, dropped
charges in August against the alleged perpetrator of the "Love Bug"
virus that jammed e-mail networks in May.

Damages from that incident were estimated in the billions of dollars.
Companies such as Ford Motor Co. and Lucent Technologies Inc. where
hit hard when communications were disrupted.

Unless crimes were defined in a similar manner across jurisdictions,
co-ordinated international law enforcement would remain very
difficult, posing serious threats to global information lifelines, the
study said.

"In the network world, no island is an island," added Mr. McConnell,
who headed the UN-supported, World Bank-funded centre that
co-ordinated international efforts to prepare for the Year 2000
computer glitch.



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