Those of us who used Yahoo and MSN chat around the years 1999 and 2000 recall how difficult it was to do away with bots and how often your hard disk would crash because of invasive applications. It was almost impossible to cope with these cyber invaders unless you were a techno genius, for someone like me who just knew the difference between monitor and CPU and hardware and software, I was always at the mercy of the computer hardware person who invariably charged huge sums to fix a minor fault and gave us so much jargon that it appeared some serious fault had occurred, whereas in reality only the web browser may have developed an error.

With several other types of cyber crimes prevalent, India too launched its version of cyber laws, but how effective are they? India created cyber laws to combat cyber crimes in the year 2000, but is it possible to practically implement them?

According to Justice Rajesh Tondon, governing head of Cyber Regulations Appellate Tribunal, cyber law has many undefined terms and for this reason they are not enforced as strongly as they should be. He was addressing the inauguration meet of the Cyber Security Summit 2009 at Bangalore

Citing an instance where a notice was to be issued where a malicious mail was received from US, but it was not done and in no way a notice could be issued. The reason for this was that as per the cyber law the notice could only be served through registered postal service or personally, no where was it stated that it could also be sent through e-mail. So the fine print failed the law enforcers.

In the meeting Tandon, pondered over issues that were allowing perpetrators of cyber crime to go scot free. He pressed members of the committee to consider these issues and requested the Union law minister to imbibe these suggestions in the up coming amendment to the cyber law.

Crimes like Phising, phony mails and bogus websites were not under the purview of cyber law. Without taking into account these crimes, cases related to these would never be brought to book.

He also brought to notice the fact that international agreements on cyber crimes were signed as long back as 1996, In the event of cyber crimes becoming more complex and the rising issue of terrorism, the cyber laws needed to extend their purview. State law minister of Karnataka, Suresh Kumar, on behalf of Chief Minister Yeddyurappa, assured that a National Cyber Security force will be set up soon.

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