Information Technology Amendment Act 2008: Time To Abandon It Has Arisen

What seems to be lonely battle has become a collective war. The precursor and axis of the protest against the “Unconstitutional” Information Technology Amendment Act, 2008 (Act, 2008) can be safely attributed to Mr. Praveen Dalal, Managing Partner of Perry4Law and the leading Techno-Legal Expert of India. Fortunately, the Act, 2008 has not been “Notified” yet and there seems to be very little chances of the same.

Interestingly, other cyber law experts have also joined the debate and openly supported Mr. Praveen Dalal regarding his stand on the proposed amendments. Concerns regarding excessive e-surveillance without proper safeguards received maximum support.

Now even the media has criticised the proposed amendments. Business Standard reports that regulation of websites in the manner proposed by the rules to the amendment is unpractical. It maintains that “The government-appointed officers, not below the rank of a joint secretary, will determine the nature of the offence and levy a penalty. But government officers are not judicial officers. Are they qualified to define, for instance, what goes against ‘friendly relations with foreign states’ and what is ‘offensive’ content? In the offline world, it is judges who do the job, and the government has no power to (for instance) cancel a newspaper’s registration merely because it has criticised a friendly country (do we have any countries that are officially listed as unfriendly?). The potential for misuse is therefore obvious. Surely, a more nuanced approach to the issues posed by the Internet is in order, not the use of a hammer for every minor infringement”.

This piece of Business Standard has very accurately defined some of the problems with the proposed amendments and their rules. There are other issues as well which may open the floodgates of litigations and problems the moment Act 2008 is brought into force. However, the Government of India (GOI) is still a moot spectator to this absurd law making and rule formulation.

The first thing that the GOI must do is to “Drop” the proposed amendments and come up with better Information Technology Amendment Act, 2009 (Act, 2009) as soon as possible. Secondly, it would be a good idea to seek advice of Techno-Legal Experts this time before formulating the Act, 2009.

SOURCE: ITVOIR

China Is Strengthening Its Cyber Law

Cyber law is gaining importance all over the World. China has become the latest country to adopt regulations pertaining to cyber law. A recent news report says that although the Western media has been awash with stories of Chinese hacking for years, cybercrime was until recently governed by three articles added to China's criminal code in 1997. The laws were out-of-date and "failed to correlate proportionately with the tremendous social harm" caused by cybercrime, according to a recent paper on Chinese cyber-law published in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics. However, the paper concludes that the country's laws are still in the early stages of development. "Gaps and inadequacies exist in traditional offense provisions". Until the new law was passed in February, computer crimes carried a maximum of three years' jail time. That has now been extended to seven years, and the definition of computer crime has also been broadened.

In the Indian context the Information Technology Act 2000 (IT Act, 2000) is the sole cyber law of India. Although India took an “early advantage” of enacting a cyber law yet it “failed to keep pace” with the contemporary requirements. The industry lobbying has kept it soft, weak and criminal friendly. The proposed Information Technology Amendment Act 2008 (Act 2008) has further complicated the scenario as it has suggested a cyber law framework that is not conducive for India.

Fortunately, the Information Technology Amendment Act 2008 has “not been notified” yet. This gives the new Government and next Parliament in session a chance to “rectify the mistake” they have commited in the recent past. Even Dr. Gulshan Rai of Department of Information Technology (DIT) has “not confirmed” that the amendments have been notified.

The speed of cyber law reforms in India is really worrisome. With the present speed and expertise, even countries that have just enacted cyber laws would overtake India in this field. There is an emergent need for the new Government and nest Parliament to give these issues a serious thought.