Kidney trouble

An invitation for bids for a healthy kidney at the most popular Internet auction house is again going to cast suspicion upon new communic...

An invitation for bids for a healthy kidney at the most popular Internet auction house is again going to cast suspicion upon new communications media. Similar outrages have happened before. They will happen again, because anarchy is in the nature of the technology. It is rare for either criminals or obnoxious characters to be traced successfully because there are a lot of people out there.

Politicians are also denied their favourite option of legislating problems out of existence because of a jurisdiction problem: the whole world is a big bailiwick. The frustration of the state in general and the law enforcement agencies in particular is understandable. So is their frenzied demand for more controls on the Net at every instance of its abuse. Inside of a week, the kidney case will have sparked off demands for fresh strictures on the Internet. Unfortunately, none of them will be enforceable.

All the chicanery of the real world thrives in the anonymity of cyberspace. The Nigerian scam, in which businessmenall over the world received letters asking them to invest in non-existent companies in the country, soon migrated to cyberspace. Instead of mail, people started getting e-mail.

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The post-Berlin Wall trade in Russian women who were dying to marry into US families found a digital echo five years later in an Internet-ramped assault on US males. This time, the women were advertised as Filipinas to die for’. These businesses were not criminal, of course, but many found them repugnant for the manner in which they turned human emotion to commercial gain. In addition, the Internet opened up a new class of cybercrime.

Every year, billions of dollars are lost by banks and corporates to hacker attacks. They refuse to report them for fear of losing investor and consumer confidence. Paedophilia was a rather arcane and lonely area of inhuman endeavour until the Net made it possible for its votaries from all over the world to get together and trade information. Terrorist organisations, too, now have their communicationsand propaganda hubs in cyberspace, which is why so much excitement was generated by the news that Osama bin Laden’s people were packing a few computers along with their RPG launchers.

But ultimately, cybercrimes are no different from real-world offences. They can all be dealt with under existing law, provided nations agree not to be too uptight about jurisdiction. Cooperation is the real challenge of the policing of cyberspace, not surveillance. The insistence of various security organisations, from the predictable Chinese and Russian to even the American, on being given the right to eavesdrop on digital communications is the signature of control freaks out of tune with the times.

The right is worthless because the information they seek will be available for prosecution anyway. The problem is always to get security agencies to call a truce in their turf wars. In a crime against a US target originating from Israel and helped along by an Australian, three governments have to cooperate to secure aconviction. Such a case did come up last year, and its successful prosecution raised hopes that attention would shift to the real issue in policing the Internet. But rest assured, the kidney fracas on eBay will belie the hope.