Will Hafta Go Online Now?
`Glory to God, and pass the ESOPs", ought to be the refrain wherever the dotcom industry congregates. The Cyber Bill has been presented almost a year after it was drafted. Actually the mood is more muted, for the nastier implications are slowly sinking in.
Is a bad law better than no law? This will be put to a practical test in the near future. Empirical evidence from the cable TV and IT industry strongly suggests that no laws are considerably better than bad laws.
Starting from zero and operating in a legal vacuum, Cable TV acquired 45 million subscribers in seven years. That's roughly twice as many as the total number of telephone connections. We could assume massive unfulfilled demand for telecom connectivity since any cable subscriber can afford a phone. The telecom industry is extremely "well-regulated" however. So private enterprise cannot fill the demand, and reduce prices. Indians wait months for a phone after paying an interest-free deposit upfront. They spend around 1,200 times as much as First-Worlders for every byte of data shifted.
The Internet/IT industry was in legal limbo until this Bill. Probably because of zero regulation, the compounded growth rate is triple digit. That is despite the insanely high cost of telecommunications and the unavailability of reliable power supplies, a vital input from another industry that is as "well-regulated" as telecom.
The erstwhile Department of Energy made its debut as the IT ministry by initiating internecine warfare _ which still continues _ with the telecom and information and broadcasting ministries, where there are obvious conflicts of interest due to convergence. The Cyber Bill was the first signal of government direction. Unfortunately it is a flawed document, designed to severely constrain e-commerce while creating a boom in hafta opportunities.
The system for recognising digital signatures imposes two limitations, which will effectively kill business-to-consumer e-commerce. The first requires users to pay Rs 25,000 upfront for registering a digital signature. This is rather higher than the average consumer will stomach.
The digital signature protocol specified is the "asymmetric -crypto" system, which is just one of some five currently competing digi-sign technologies. By this time next year, all of them will be obsolete. Long before Parliament passes amendments to enable digi-sign upgrades, the certificate system will be hacked to a fare-thee-well.
The anti-cyber crime provisions won't prevent hacking. A Mafiaboy sitting in Canada, or a Spyderman in the Philippines will do it with impunity. So will a kid in Lajpat Nagar. The proposed Rs 1 crore fine is a sick joke, since hackers don't have that sort of money.
Post-attack damage will be compounded by the indiscriminate use of powers under Clause 79 of Chapter 13 of the Bill. The cops will end up arresting victims and confiscating their equipment. Cyber crimes like the denial of service attack by Mafiaboy and the Filipino ILU virus are detected by clever analysis of code, and intelligent deduction from telltale cyberspace traces. No suspension of human rights is either necessary or effective.
Even after the deletion of the monitoring/registration clauses in 73 A, the Cyber Bill grants broad powers of harassment exceeding anything since Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (prevention) Act (Tada). The police can still search and arrest any one and confiscate equipment on mere suspicion of a cyber crime. Without warrants, or comebacks in case of deliberate miscarriage of justice. The possibilities for hafta will make every corrupt cop salivate. A suspected murderer, a rapist, or a babu caught with his fingers in the till, all get more protection than a suspected cyber criminal. The police have to convince magistrates of prima facie reasons for the issue of search and arrest warrants. Have our legislators lost their sense of proportion completely? Or is this a back-door attempt to take hafta online?