From robbery to martyrdom

The internet has brought vast opportunities for businesses and individuals but it has also opened up new avenues of operation for criminals.

Cybercrime has become one of the most dangerous and difficult areas of illegal activity for law enforcement bodies to police. It includes a wide variety of activity from child pornography to internet fraud to dissemination of terrorist-related information and to cyber warfare, where entire systems vital to the running of a state are brought down.

Every member state in the EU is currently tackling the problem. Swoops on people involved in disseminating, buying and selling child pornography over the internet regularly involve several EU states in each operation. The UK-based Internet Watch Foundation estimates that the number of websites depicting child abuse has increased by 1,500% between 1997 and 2005.

Some 750,000 computers in Germany are infected with Botnets every year, which take over computers remotely so that they can be controlled by hackers. Fraud over the internet is also steadily on the increase with the UK Financial Services Authority estimating an increase of 8,000% in internet banking fraud over the past two years.

Given the global nature of the phenomenon, the problem has to be dealt with internationally and the EU has proposed several measures to try to tackle cybercrime. In 1999, a meeting of EU leaders in Tampere, Finland, agreed to introduce "common definitions, incriminations and sanctions" on hi-tech crime. Since then the European Commission has adopted a paper, called creating a safer information society by improving the security of information infrastructures and combating computer-related crime. The aim of the paper was to look at the need for EU-wide policy in terms of legislation, co-operation among users, police and industry, and the availability of trained law enforcement officials.

An EU forum on cybercrime met for the first time in November 2001, bringing together industry, governments and interest groups to discuss ways of combating the problem. Soon after, the Commission proposed various legislative proposals on common approaches to cybercrime, including child pornography on the internet, racism and xenophobia and attacks on information systems.

More recent initiatives include the data retention directive which compels telecommunication companies to store emails and phone calls in case they might be useful for police in fighting terrorism. In May this year a Commission paper called for greater co-operation between governments and industry to fight cybercrime in general. Just two weeks ago, as part of a major package on counter-terrorism, Franco Frattini, European commissioner for justice, freedom and security, announced an initiative to criminalise incitement to violence over the internet, with a particular focus on terrorism.

But civil liberties groups have expressed concern about the erosion of freedom of expression on the internet with such proposals. In particular, the recent proposal to criminalise incitement over the internet has led many to question how legitimate political opinion can be protected.

Grass-roots initiatives often work best when tackling cybercrime. One of the more successful aspects to the fight against child pornography involves people alerting groups such as the Internet Watch Foundation to the presence of illegal images on the internet. These contact the internet service provider hosting the site, which can then shut the site down in a matter of hours.

But the co-ordinated cyber attacks on Estonian computer systems earlier this year, which affected a range of government websites, including those of the parliament and governmental institutions, showed that cyber-attackers are still in the ascendancy. Estonia and the Portuguese presidency recently called on nations at the United Nations to sign up to the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime. "What occurred in Estonia could happen to some other nation at any time," Estonian ambassador to the UN, Tiina Intelmann, said.

The internet has brought vast opportunities for businesses and individuals but it has also opened up new avenues of operation for criminals.