Cyber Crime Deconstructed

On Thursday, February 17, 2005, a seminar on 'Cyber Crime : Issues And Development' organised by the Department of Sociology, University of Calcutta, was held at the Department of Business Management seminar room, CU Alipur Campus. The arrangements were primarily made by the Post-Graduate students of the organising department.

The session was inaugurated and chaired by the Guest of Honour, Prof. Arun Kumar Bandopadhyay, Nurul Hasan Professor of History and Dean, CU Faculty of Arts. Touching upon the issues of obscenity, privacy and morality associated with cyber crime, he elucidated, by means of "public" and "private" examples, as he called them, how advancing technology changes the nature of crime.

In his speech, Prof. A.R. Thakur, Vice-Chancellor, West Bengal University of Technology, identified the conflict between free software and open source as the reason behind many a cyber crime. Casting an interesting sidelight on the genesis of information technology in military engineering, he emphasised the point that in the European Union, pornography regulations are more against child abuse than against pornography in general.

Prof. Chandan Mazumder from the Centre for Distributed Computing and the Department of Computer Science Engineering, Jadavpur University utilised digital presentation techniques to full effect to explain the different aspects of cyber crime, like criminal, privacy, publicity and legal attacks, fraud, intellectual property theft, data harvesting, web-page defacing, to name a few. What was particularly enlightening was his elucidation of such relevant terms such as 'hacker, 'cracker', 'threat', 'authorisation', 'vulnerability' etc. in relation to cyber crime. Dividing the building blocks of security into access, communication, storage and application securities, he left open the issue of how much is too much. He also defined the phases of security management such as requirement analysis, policy formulation, installation and configuration, security and selection infrastructures etc. Though he prescribed the proactive method of information and security, and the reactive method of detection and response, to prevent cyber crime, he was quick to add that the internet is inherently insecure owing to its modest military origin.

In his paper entitled 'Crime In Digital Age', Prof. Anirban Mazumder from the National University of Juridical Sciences, brought out the evolving nature of cyber law both in India and abroad. He pointed out that the element of 'annoyance' being excluded from the purview of the Indian Information Technology Act, 2000, makes this act a shade weaker than the Indian Penal Code, framed prior to the arrival of the cyber age, as he highlighted the fact that according to Section 81, of the Indian Information Technology Act, 2000, in case of its conflict with any other act, the former will prevail. He also stressed on the technical deficiency that does not allow blocking software to differentiate between pornographic and medical materials in the internet.

Among the other dignitaries sharing their valuable observations on cyber crime were eminent sociologist, Prof. Bela Duttagupta; Dr. Subhasish Mukhopadhyay, Head of the Department of Bio-Physics CU; Prof. Bholanath Bandopadhyay, Head of the Department of Sociology, CU; and Joint Convenors, Prof. Bula Bhadra and Ms. Sudeshna Basu Mukherjee.

The lively question-answer session following each lecture electrified the proceedings. Whereas the informative cartoons and cut-outs added spice to the seminar, the post-session snacks provided the red cherry on the top.