PHENOMENAL EXPLORATION INTO IMPACT OF ANONYMITY ON LAW AND ORDER IN CYBERSPACE

While information systems provide modern society with great convenience, it also poses new problems in maintaining social order. One of its negative influences is the anonymity of cyberspace, which makes identity tracing a noteworthy predicament which poses obstacles in detection and investigations. It has been found that cyber anonymity has critical impacts on criminal motivation, and the phenomena of victimization, and should be tackled on different layers including technology and law enforcement. The article explores how the anonymity symbolizes the cyberspace, what threats are posed by cyber anonymity against social order, what potentialities the anonymity has, how the trans-territorial anonymity was facilitated, and the real impact of anonymity on law and order in the information society

Fighting Cybercrime After \u3cem\u3eUnited States v. Jones\u3c/em\u3e

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus on the technologies that make collecting and aggregating large quantities of information possible. In those efforts, we focused on reasonable expectations held by “the people” that they will not be subjected to broad and indiscriminate surveillance. These expectations are anchored in Founding-era concerns about the capacity for unfettered search powers to promote an authoritarian surveillance state. Although we also readily acknowledged that there are legitimate and competing governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in the deployment and use of surveillance technologies that implicate reasonable interests in quantitative privacy, we did little more. In this Article, we begin to address that omission by focusing on the legitimate governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting cyber-harassment and healthcare fraud

Criminal Law in Cyberspace

Two of the most talked-about crimes of the year, the ILoveYou computer worm and the denial of service attacks on Yahoo, eBay, and ETrade, suggest that a new form of crime is emerging: cybercrime. Thousands of these crimes occur each year, and the results are often catastrophic; in terms of economic damage, the ILoveYou worm may have been the most devastating crime in history, causing more than $11 billion in losses. This paper asks how cybercrime is best deterred. It identifies five constraints on crime - legal sanctions, monetary perpetration cost, social norms, architecture, and physical risks - and explains how each of these constraints may be reduced by committing crime in cyberspace. The ease of cybercrime risks negative substitution effects, as offenders move away from realspace and look towards the Net. Because cybercrime requires fewer resources and less investment to cause a given level of harm, the law might want to use approaches that differ somewhat from those in realspace. In part, this is so because computers provide a cheaper means to perpetrate crime. Criminal law must be concerned not only with punishing crime ex post, but with creating ex ante barriers to inexpensive ways of carrying out criminal activity. For example, if computers serve as substitutes for conspirators, then law might develop doctrines that treat computers as quasi-conspirators and establish inchoate liability. Some government barriers, however, will create dead-weight losses. For example, encryption has the potential to further massive terrorism (which leads many in the law enforcement community to advocate its criminalization) but also the potential to facilitate greater security in communication and encourage freedom (which leads many others to push for unfettered access to the technology). To help solve such problems, the paper advocates the use of sentencing enhancements as tools that surgically target bad acts. Sentencing enhancements have received relatively little attention in the academic literature; this Article attempts to fill that gap. Cyberspace also adds additional parties to the traditional perpetrator-victim scenario of crime. In particular, much cybercrime is carried out through the use of Internet Service Providers. Law should impose modest responsibilities on third parties because doing so promotes cost deterrence and capitalizes on what Reinier Kraakman has called gatekeeper liability. Third parties can develop ways to make crime more expensive, and may be able to do so in ways that the government cannot always directly accomplish, such as cost effective regulation of the architecture of the Net. The same logic sometimes applies to victims of cybercrime; law can develop mechanisms to encourage optimal victim behavior as well. Burden-shifting must not, however, sacrifice the value of interconnectivity and network effects

Community Self Help

This paper advocates controlling crime through a greater emphasis on precautions taken not by individuals, but by communities. The dominant battles in the literature today posit two central competing models of crime control. In one, the standard policing model, the government is responsible for the variety of acts that are necessary to deter and prosecute criminal acts. In the other, private self-help, public law enforcement is largely supplanted by providing incentives to individuals to self-protect against crime. There are any number of nuances and complications in each of these competing stories, but the literature buys into this binary matrix

PHENOMENAL EXPLORATION INTO IMPACT OF ANONYMITY ON LAW AND ORDER IN CYBERSPACE

While information systems provide modern society with great convenience, it also poses new problems in maintaining social order. One of its negative influences is the anonymity of cyberspace, which makes identity tracing a noteworthy predicament which poses obstacles in detection and investigations. It has been found that cyber anonymity has critical impacts on criminal motivation, and the phenomena of victimization, and should be tackled on different layers including technology and law enforcement. The article explores how the anonymity symbolizes the cyberspace, what threats are posed by cyber anonymity against social order, what potentialities the anonymity has, how the trans-territorial anonymity was facilitated, and the real impact of anonymity on law and order in the information society

Cyberstalking: a content analysis of gender-based offenses committed online.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.The 21st century has come up with the increased usage of technology and this has been welcomed by cyber stalkers for it has exacerbated cyberstalking. Cyberstalking therefore has grown considerably within the contemporary environment. Cyberstalking entails the inappropriate, uninvited social exchange behaviours initiated by a perpetrator via online or wireless communication technology and devices. Forms of cyberstalking includes sending threatening or obscene electronic emails, harassing in chat rooms, spamming, tracing another person's computer and internet activity, and posting threatening or harassing messages on blogs or through social media. The study utilised qualitative research methods in which documentary search was utilised as the secondary source of data collection. The study therefore gathered that gender based offences have considerably increased online. The study gathered that women (particularly young women aged 18-24) disproportionately experience severe types of cyber harassment, namely cyberstalking and online sexual harassment. The study also gathered that there are a number of ways which have been documented to deal with cybercrime. Raising awareness, setting up and supporting peer-support networks for the eradicating gender based offences committed online and there is need for industry regulations such as punishment from using twitter and YouTube if found to be offensive. The study also gathered that cyber stalkers are motivated by a number of ways. The first category are those that need to fulfil the psychological needs, wishes, or cravings regarding the victim on the part of the perpetrator and the second category are those motivated by the need to instil fear and gain control over the victim. The third group consists of those cyber stalkers who are motivated with the need to seek revenge or punish the victim. And the last group of cyber stalkers are those motivated by the need to build a relationship with the victim. The study therefore recommends for the need to implement cyber stalking regulations within South Africa for the ones that have been acted are not being efficient in combating cyberstalking

Investigating cybercrimes under the Malaysian cyberlaws and the criminal procedure code: issues and challenges

Investigating cybercrimes requires full commitment and readiness to fight the criminals. This means the investigating officer or any authorised person must not only have good knowledge and skills to detect the suspect and investigate cases of cybercrimes but he must also be ready to face the consequences. In this regard, having good procedural laws and adequate statutory provisions are very important to face the challenges ahead. To ensure the smooth running of investigation process, it is very important that the rules of procedures and certain standards of practice are complied with. This paper will discuss the process of investigating cybercrimes under the Malaysian cyberlaws and the Criminal Procedure Code ('CPC') with the aim to identify any inadequacies and challenges faced by the investigators. The main reference would be the Computer Crimes Act 1997, the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 and the Criminal Procedure Code. Other laws will also be referred to as background information