Commission faces an uphill struggle to clamp down on spiralling cyber crime

Date: 16/03/2000

By Simon Coss

CRIMINALS who use online networks such as the Internet to commit offences are notoriously difficult to catch.

The advent of the Web has provided law breakers - be they money launderers, producers of child pornography or credit-card fraudsters - with a vast new array of tools with which to carry out their criminal activities.

They can now transfer money around the world at the click of a mouse and sites set up on computer servers in one country can be moved to another within minutes.

The fact that the Internet is a global network functioning in a world where law enforcement is still very much a national responsibility makes things even more complicated for those trying track down and capture the 'e-criminals'.

The European Commission is currently working on an action plan which will set out how the organisation believes the Union should go about fighting online crime. Two Commissioners are joining forces to prepare the initiative, Finnish information society chief Erkki Liikanen and Portugal's António Vitorino, who is in charge of justice and home affairs policy.

Both are fully aware of the problems they face in trying to draw up legislation to govern what is essentially an anarchic system. They have also indicated that they will focus on coming up with realistic responses to cyber crime and not waste time proposing laws which could never be enforced in practice.

Commission officials say the institution's efforts to combat online criminal activity will be linked to broader Union initiatives to tackle organised crime in general, with the e-crime initiatives forming part of a wider policy paper on efforts to combat international criminal gangs which the Commission hopes to publish in the summer.

The institution was asked to draw up the organised crime paper by EU leaders at their special justice and home affairs summit in Tampere last October.

But while everyone acknowledges the need to do something to crack down on the new generation of cyber criminals, they also recognise that it will be incredibly difficult to draft effective laws that everyone can agree on.

The Commission tacitly admitted the size of the challenge earlier this year when it stressed that the forthcoming paper on organised crime would not contain any formal legislative proposals but would merely try to give an overview of the current situation.

One of the biggest problems the institution will face is coming up with an approach which is acceptable to civil liberties organisations concerned that police forces will be given unrestricted access to people's personal data. This would not only be seen as a serious attack on a person's fundamental right to privacy but could also risk strangling the emerging e-commerce industry at birth.

In addition, the fact that the Internet is a world-wide and not solely European phenomenon means that EU rules on cyber crime will effectively be useless unless they are accompanied by wider international agreements.

One such deal is an international convention currently being brokered by the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, whose members include all 15 EU member states and many of the central and eastern European and former Soviet countries where much cyber crime currently originates.

Officials say that the Commission, which regularly takes part in the organisation's deliberations, has made it clear that it will not propose any formal cyber-crime rules until the Council's convention has been finalised and that will not happen before the end of this year, at the earliest.

Criminals who use online networks such as the Internet to commit offences are notoriously difficult to catch. The advent of the Web has provided law breakers - be they money launderers, producers of child pornography or credit-card fraudsters - with a vast new array of tools with which to carry out their criminal activities. Article forms part of a survey on the Information Society.