Learning curve

Since then, US agencies have kept pace with the development of the Internet. Indian enforcers, on the other hand, will have to come to terms with the whole gamut of digital crime at once. The Internet now carries commerce, banking, international trade, military and corporate secrets, besides old-fashioned intellectual property. Each of these categories has given rise to a body of law that varies from country to country. The Indian agencies will need to set up specialised corps of personnel who are intellectually capable of handling this. The Delhi case is a plain boy-harasses-girl issue.

Internet cases tend to be rather more complicated than that. The ruckus about music distributed over the Internet, for instance, was about whether you have the right to keep in the temporary cache on your hard disk in India a bit of music that someone else has taken from a record company in the UK and put up on a server in Japan.

People working on cybercrime will have to be techno-literate. Some of them will have to match the hacker they are up against skill for skill. Several countries have discovered, in fact, that you need a reformed hacker to catch another hacker. Which goes to show just how far behind the times we are.

Which police organisation in India would consider handing out jobs to criminals who have returned to the straight and narrow? But there is the countervailing truth: as of now, which policeman on the beat can even understand the ramifications of Internet crime? So far, digital crime here has been petty–cases of misrepresentation, theft of passwords and stalking.

But in the near future, the authorities will have to deal with credit card numbers stolen online, manipulated bank accounts and corporate secrets pilfered on the fly. At that point, employing a hacker will begin to look like a pretty good option.