Somewhere off a Beijing suburb, a 28-year-old cracks the US Department of Defense intranet at the Pentagon. He gets out vital defense secrets.

Where did the crime occur? In cyberspace. The cracker even used PC and e-mail which did not belong to him. Even if he’s tracked down, there are few laws in place to charge him, bring him to book or to prove him guilty.

This is the genre of cyber crime confronting a borderless world whose laws are not as borderless. One in which there’s no effective, standard way of legalizing tackling crimes over the Internet.

Nevertheless, each country is trying to evolve its own set of cyber laws and legalize IT bills to secure its netizens, citizens within a physical geography who are also part of the global Internet. This is definitely the first step towards evolving a system of handling cyber-crime and enabling online, electronic commerce.

India has also been one of the early starters in this area. It’s studied various models of cyber laws in different countries, and drafted and announced its IT Act 2000.

Cyber laws: Security and privacy

This summer, the Ministry of IT passed the IT Bill in Parliament, and announced the IT Act in June this year. This set of "cyberlaws" spans the recognition and legalization of electronic documents, authorizing use of these by means of affixing digital signatures, establishing a digital signature certifying authority, identifying cyber crimes and corresponding punitive measures, laying down the procedure of regulation for certifying authorities and amending other laws to make them consistent with the IT Act.

The Act is a good thing, say managers in the IT industry and user enterprises. "It has boosted the confidence of the people to go in for e-commerce," says V Ramakrishnan, EDP manager, Indian Bank. "The cyber laws have armed and strengthened the enterprise. The government has built a lot of the security aspects into the law. Ashish Sinha, VP, technology, Citibank, agrees. "We’re one of the few countries where such laws have been formulated," he says.

Explaining the IT Act, AK Chakravarti, advisor in the Ministry of IT, says that a primary motive was to instill confidence in the enterprise. "Security is everyone’s primary concern, including ours," he says. "Before drafting anything, we studied the latest across the world on IT security, and tried to include their essence in our draft."

But the enterprise focus also brings in some criticism, such as from N Vijayashankar (Naavi), who has authored a book on cyberlaws and runs a Web site on the subject. "Has the government looked at security as an objective of the IT Act?" he asks. "The basis of cyber laws appears to be to promote e-commerce and the billions of dollars in revenue from the same, rather than providing security."

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