Can The Existing Laws Be Applied To Cyberspace? Essay, Research Paper

This new, powerful, global tool of communication we call the Internet has taken the relatively controllable problems of terrorism, pornography, hate speech, etc, and emphasized one common factor to all of these problems: accessibility. Everybody knows that if you can control the accessibility to these types of problems, you can at least control the problem in general, right? But wait, we are dealing in cyberspace now. Remember the keyword anonymity, because it is about to show how it can come back to haunt you. The governments are all starting to wake up to this now, trying to grasp the problems in cyberspace without realizing they are way behind in the race. In late July, the G-7 ministers got together to discuss and figure out how as a team, consisting of the most technologically advanced countries, they could put a stop to the Internet s shady side. With the focus on terrorism, our very own Canadian External Affairs Minister, Loyd Axworthy, admitted that there is a generation growing up that has a new tool, a powerful, powerful tool of communications, perhaps one of the most powerful we ve ever had and we haven t really looked at it yet to see what its implications are. 2 Axworthy s son may have showed the real priority concern for children when it comes to the Net. Axworthy told how his 11-year-old son easily found terrorism-related information on the Net. 3 Ironically it is the kids of today whom are influenced the most by the Internet and yet they know more about it than the people who are trying to apply laws and rules to protect them. Protecting your country from terrorists is one thing that has always existed but once again, the accessibility factor comes into play. The Net enables anyone to share information from how to ruin a reputation to killing people, regardless of where they live. A perfect example of this was in 1996 when the Unabomber demonstrated the terrorist gone high-tech. With access to information about bombs and being able to distribute your demands anonymously all in the comfort of your own hideout must have been heaven for the Unabomber.

Some laws have successfully been applied to the Internet, just ask Jose Saaverda, a 19-year-old University of Texas student who was charged with using the Internet to make a terrorist threat against a public official. He found out the hard way that California law states the penalty for threatening on the Internet carries a fine of up $6,200 US and a maximum of 3 years in prison. Canada has similar laws for such cases, which carry up to 5 years in prison.4 Police and other law enforcement agencies are learning that accessibility on the Internet is a two way street. The Internet is now being used as a potentially powerful investigative tool, which was used recently to catch the creator of the Melissa virus. Canada s own Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) is using the net in this way but has run into the problems of other laws which come into play in cyberspace. They must respect the privacy issues concerning the users of the Internet. We can t just tap into someone s Internet account at random. We need to submit a request for a search warrant from the federal court first. 5 There is little doubt that agencies like CSIS will be concentrating more attention to the net as more and more criminals are attracted by the accessibility and anonymity of the Net.