Cyber Crime Cells Of India Lacks Expertise

Law enforcement is a tedious task especially in the present information technology world. Technology has posed many challenges before police forces in India regarding cyber crimes. In the absence of awareness about cyber law of India, police officials in India are avoiding dealing with growing cyber crimes in India.

Even if a case is registered for cyber crime, police officials in India do not possess required expertise to solve the same. For instance, even basic level cyber forensics capabilities are missing in various cyber cells of India. Although cyber cells have been opened in India yet a dominant majority of them are not actually doing anything for solving cyber crimes.

The main reason for this poor performance is lack of cyber law and cyber forensics knowledge. It would be unfair to expect an expert knowledge from police officers in India but they must at least know the basics of cyber law and cyber forensics. They must have at least basic level of techno legal cyber law and cyber forensics trainings.

Home Minister of India Mr. P. Chidambaram must seriously consider projects and initiatives that can help in developing cyber skills of police force in India. Issues like cyber law and cyber forensics have not yet been considered important enough by him so far.

Further, good and effective trainings courses must also be arranged for police force in India that is presently missing. With ever increasing use of technology, police work in India is going to be more challenging. Police force must be prepared for this challenging job.

Blackberry Messenger Service Now An E- Surveillance Tool In India

Research in motion (RIM) has been under tremendous pressure form Indian government to allow e-surveillance and interception of its Blackberry services. In order to safeguard its commercial interests in India, Blackberry has established a framework that would allow Indian intelligence agencies to monitor contents on its messenger service.

Blackberry has now asked the Indian government to issue a directive to the operators to connect to its new automated service that would allow such interceptions. However, this arrangement does not extend to the enterprise Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution, provided through the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) product.

RIM is still maintaining that there can be no change to the security architecture for BES in India or any other country as the decoding of BES emails by RIM is not technically possible. This is so because neither RIM nor the wireless operators are ever in possession of the customers' encryption keys.

India has presently no constitutionally valid phone tapping and lawful interception law. This practically means that Blackberry/RIM is supporting Indian government in its illegal phone tappings and interception exercises.

The BES of RIM is still out of the reach of Indian government because of technology alone. For other purposes as well, Blackberry users must use technology for self defence and to protect their civil liberties.

A research project named RIM Check has also been designed to gather information on how traffic exits the Blackberry network depending on the country in which the user is located. Those wish to analyse their Blackberry traffic to detect illegal e-surveillance by Indian government, can submit their data to this project.

Government Is Responsible For Growing Cyber Crimes In India

Cyber crimes in India have increased at an alarming stage. What is worrisome is the fact that it is the Indian government itself that is responsible for this menace. India has a sole cyber law that is incorporated in the information technology act, 2000 (IT Act, 2000). Though it needed improvements but there was no case for its deterioration to the detriment of national interest of India.

Indian government brought the deleterious information technology amendment act, 2008 (IT Act, 2008). Through this amendment almost all the cyber crimes have been made bailable and this removed all sorts of deterrence for the cyber criminals in India and world wide. Indian cyber law is already a piecemeal attempt and this amendment further made it a bane for India.

Concerns regarding India becoming a safe heaven for cyber criminals were incessantly raised by techno legal experts of India but Indian government did not pay heed to the same. Naturally, the present situation was bound to arise.

In the interest of India, Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh must urgently intervene and ensure that an effective, strong and stringent cyber law is enacted. The present cyber law of India is doing much more harm than any help for India.