WATBlog has kept a close eye on cyber crimes and the evolution of cyber laws in India. The urgent need for improvement in the current state of affairs is felt very strongly. The need for stronger cyber laws, and more well defined rules on how to deal with online malpractices need to be properly dealt with. More, so is the growing number of sites that circulate pornography.
It must be important if the Chief Justice of India feels so strongly against it. Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan emphasized the need for strict cyber law enforcement and said there was an urgent need to ban websites circulating pornography.
In the past, we covered quite a few instances of cyber crime in India, from online scams to how India tops the Internet Piracy list. Browse the archives of cyber crime for the most recent stories.
Cyber Crime is not new to India. What is surprising is that the Chief Justice of India should himself take such a strong statement against it. Also speaking on the occasion, Union Minister of Law and Justice M. Veerappa Moily said: “Cyber law enforcement is the need of the hour as the use of technology is increasing by leaps and bounds. We are able to optimize the use of Information Technology (IT) industry only when our cyber law is strictly enforced.”
What is pitiable is that cyber fraud is often committed in the name of the Government. For example, the Hindustan Times recently carried an article on how a fraudulent website www.rvk.net.in was luring people by promising them jobs at the National Science Centre and Department of Science and Technology website. The site still exists?
The trouble with pornography is that it’s too hard to curtail. Finding and shutting down is a continual process. Occasionally, certain sites are shut down (some due to their increasing popularity, case in point : Savita Bhabhi). However, it is quite easy to route a site through a proxy.
A lot of public internet access joints prevent porn access by employment of filters or third party clients. But getting around that is also not difficult. The crime here is not just pornography, but the fact that these sites are often dangerous and have high malaware content.
So what corrective action should the government take? Ban all websites that circulate pornography? Do you focus on the website? Then what about social networking sites? Will they be held accountable?
The Cyber Cell Mumbai lists the following as Cyber Crimes :
- Hacking
- Child Pornography
- Cyber Stalking
- Denial of service Attack
- Virus Dissemination
- Software Piracy
- IRC Crime
- Credit Card Fraud
- Net Extortion
- Phishing
What about Identity thefts? What about dissemination of material online that is considered illegal offline?
Last year we wrote about the IT Act Amendment 2008. Check it out here.
Are you aware of cyber crime? Are you aware of what qualifies as a cyber crime? Are you aware of how to protect yourself? How to report a cyber crime?
We’d like feedback on the above matter.
Great, I can see that we’re following in the footsteps of China now.
Hi,
It is not at all difficult to completely block the porn content on the internet as the solution is already implemented by various governments & internet service providers across the world. However, the better way is to completey block the extreme content like rape, theft learning, criminal skills, DOS attacks, phishing, child pornography, malware, viruses, etc rather blocking the complete adult rated web content. All the above could be brought under cyber crimes/criminal proceedings as per the cyber law and act. People try to access these content via anonymous proxies also can be identified and blocked. Solutions are very much available. This is all in the best public interests and also to protect our democracy and the culture but not on any other motive.