Computer Crimes (Activity 12-1)

What constitutes a computer crime?

According to the Encarta, crime is the commission of an act or act of omission that violates the law and is punishable by the state. The commission or omission of such act escorts itself with the malice intention to abuse an individual, institution or property for purposes of personal gain, advantage or satisfaction. When the use of computers becomes the major factor in committing these acts, it is a computer crime. There can be several ways where the use of computers is involved in a crime. Computer may be the primary target of the offense for the purpose of stealing classified information or simply causing damage or alteration to the computer. Another one is the use of computer as a tool to commit a criminal offense.

Laws on computer crimes are results of the legislative efforts in order to curb down the abusive use of computer technology. These abusive actions may involve the following:

• computer network intrusions
• network integrity violations
• privacy violations
• industrial espionage
• pirated computer software
• child pornography
• E-mail bombings
• password sniffers
• Spoofing
• Credit card fraud

Because of the diverse cultures in one country to another, not all countries have the necessary applicable laws that control abusive actions related to the above list. However, it is clear that what constitutes a computer crime requires the human act and use or intervention of computer resources which in turn violates existing laws imposed by the state.

Three examples of computer crimes.

1. Human trafficking and exploitation thru electronic means - Although web services like chatting and Mail order bride are not illegal, law that cater to these area should be well formulated to protect the welfare of its contituents most especially women and children. These services can be alternative means to exploit young children which is why government intervention is highly required. Unscrupulous people capitalizing on mail order brides and facilities of similar operation in order to satisfy there abusive intentions constitutes a computer crime.

2. Electronic Money Laundering

Money laundering is defined as the conversion or transfer of property, knowing that such property is derived from criminal activity, for the purpose of concealing the illicit nature and origin of the property from government authorities. Money laundering is considered a very serious offense because it undermines the normal movement of financial resources of the country which has a significant impact on the economy. It is always directly linked with criminal activities such as drug syndicates, smuggling and trafficking prohibited goods because of the significant profit derived from these illegal activities. With the advent of new technologies such as the e-commerce, money laundering using electronic means has escalated to newer heights. Since every country have their respective money laundering laws, the strengthening of existing laws is called for, to address this new modes of laundering financial resources.

3. Software cracking.

Software piracy comes in so many different ways. In order for pirated copies to flourish in the black market, there should be means to access original copies of it. Although cracking per se may be not considered a crime in some countries, software cracking is the prevalent mode of producing pirated copies of the original software. Answer.com defines software cracking as the modification of a software, to remove the encoded copy prevention which is most often done by software reverse engineering. Software cracking therefore is an act that infringes the copyrights of the original author. However, because the idea of reverse engineering alone is not a crime, whether it is a criminal act or not, remains to be an unanswered question.
This is the case that happens on DVD piracy. The motion picture industry negotiated an encryption standard for digital video discs (DVD). This standard allowed regionalized use of DVDs so that only certain DVD players can play DVDs restricted to a particular region. There are 7 regions standard set worldwide including region 0 where the latter is supposed to play in all regions. Along with this development, a small group of Norwegian hackers recently released a program, called DeCSS, that breaks the encryption on almost any DVD disk. DeCSS program quickly spawned to the internet and opportunists immediately make use of this discovery. As a result, DVD players that virtually run in any region-encrypted DVDs come out so fast in the black market. In addition, modified copies or pirated version of DVD software are easily set to region 0 thereby disabling the DVD encryption. The question that remains in this case is the legal dispute that would dictate whether publishing links of certain materials online such as the DeCSS program is legal or not.