Bhubaneswar, March 8: A leading expert on cyber laws Saturday called for adoption of a proactive approach jointly by governments, industry, individuals and the public to effectively counter all forms of cyber crimes.
“There is a need to set up more agencies specifically entrusted with different tasks associated with combating cyber crimes, which should work in coordination with each other to achieve the objective,” , said Prof A Nagarathna, Chief Investigator of Advanced Centre for Development and Training in Cyber Laws and Forensics at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore.
This could be done by establishing separate agencies on the lines of the National Infrastructure Protection Centre of the US, he said at a training program-cum-seminar on cyber security laws organised by the NLSIU in collaboration with the SOA National Institute of Law (SNIL), the faculty of legal studies of the SOA University here.
He stressed the need to generate a contact system with police of all other countries to ensure that investigations even beyond the boundaries were also made possible.
The first Indian law relating to cyber crimes — Information Technology Act, 2000 — was enacted with the primary aim of facilitating e-commerce transactions and e-governance and hence had failed to address all essential issues relating to cyber crimes, he remarked.
Nagarathna said the provisions relating to cyber crimes were not effective enough. “Recent amendments to the enactment in 2008 addresses some of these issues but are still not effective enough to deal with all types of cyber crimes as some forms of such crimes still remained outside the purview of the law,” he said.
The lack of harmonised definition of cyber crimes and lack of international cooperation in tackling the menace were the other problems which required immediate solutions, he said.
“Inter-state cooperation may not be sufficient if the private sector, including companies producing hardware and software, are not involved in the process,” he said. UNI
