Sri Lanka’s law enforcement challenges:

Combating cyber crime

Excerpts of the plenary presentation made by Deputy Inspector General of Police Asoka Wijetilleka at the Annual Scientific Sessions of the Medico Legal Society of Sri Lanka at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (SLFI)

Computer interconnectivity has produced enormous benefits but has also enabled criminal activity that exploits this interconnectivity for financial gain and other malicious purposes such as internet fraud, identity thefts, pornography and terrorism, to name a few.

Numerous challenges impede the efforts of law enforcement in particular and public and private sector partnerships in general to mitigate cyber crime. The first of such challenges is ensuring accurate reporting of cyber crime to law enforcement

Cyber crimes - harmful acts committed from or against a computer or network-differ from most terrestrial crimes in four ways. They are easy to learn how to commit; they require few resources relative to the potential damage caused; they can be committed in a jurisdiction without being physically present in it; and they are often not clearly illegal.

Nature of cyberspace

Effective law enforcement is complicated by the transnational nature of cyberspace. Mechanisms of cooperation across national borders to solve and prosecute crimes are complex and slow.

Cyber criminals can defy the conventional jurisdictional realms of sovereign nations, originating an attack from almost any computer in the world. passing it across multiple national boundaries, or designing attacks that appear to be originating from foreign sources. Such techniques dramatically increase both the technical and legal complexities of investigating and prosecuting cyber crimes.

Outdated laws and regulations, and weak enforcement mechanisms for protecting networked information, create an inhospitable environment in which to conduct e-business within a country and across national boundaries. Inadequate legal protection of digital information can create barriers to its exchange and stunt the growth of e-commerce. As e-business expands globally, the need for strong and consistent means to protect networked information will grow.

Efforts to address cyber crime include activities associated with protecting networks and information, detecting criminal activity, investigating such crime and prosecuting criminals.

Need to enhance knowledge of law enforcement

To do so, one of the biggest challenges is to ensuring adequate law enforcement analytical, technical and investigative capabilities, keeping up to date with current technology and criminal technique or behaviours, protecting information and information systems, raising awareness with regard to criminal behaviour.

However much there could be numerous partnerships between public sector entities, between public and private sector entities and internationally, all these entities face a number of key challenges in addressing cyber crime, including reporting cyber crime and ensuring that there are adequate analytical capabilities to support law enforcement.

Numerous challenges impede the efforts of law enforcement in particular and public and private sector partnerships in general to mitigate cyber crime. The first of such challenges is ensuring accurate reporting of cyber crime to law enforcement. The second is ensuring adequate law enforcement training and developing their analytical and technical capabilities.

Specialized skills and tools

As many of us are aware, efforts by the law enforcement to investigate cyber crime requires individuals with specialized skills and tools. For us it has become a challenge to train such individuals from a limited pool of available talent, retain them in the face of competing offers and train them to stay upto date with changing technology and increasingly sophisticated criminal techniques.

Sri Lanka Police, face challenges in having the appropriate number of skilled investigators, forensic examiners and prosecutors. This is because individual involved in investigating or examining cyber crimes have to be highly trained specialists requiring both law enforcement and technical skills, including knowledge of various IT hardware and software and forensic tools.

The next issue of relevance is the need with the rapid evolution of technology and cyber crime techniques for the law enforcement agencies to continuously upgrade technical equipment and software tools. One of the main problems associated with the lack of efficiency and productivity of this area of law enforcement, arises out of the lack of necessary expertise and even primary knowledge of relevant area of work, by officers who are routinely called upon to perform law enforcement work in the area of cyber crime. There is also a compelling need to develop a group of police officers specially trained in the area of cyber crime law enforcement.

Therefore awareness and continued exposure and training and re-training becomes a strategic priority and is the most important challenge in addressing cyber threats. If there is no or limited possibility to help and develop adequate law enforcement capabilities we may run into greater risk, seriously impeding the effective investigative mechanism.

Computer criminals exploit weaknesses in laws as well as vulnerabilities in technology and human frailty. Therefore, law enforcement community needs sufficient training and exposure to investigate, collect evidence, identify the offenders and prosecute.

Capacity building

Hence, a priority requirement at this stage is to provide capacity building in the nature of (a) awareness in training of basics (b) computer forensics training and (C) the management and the supervision of investigations into cyber crime to the Police officers.

Take the case of internet - a mix of good and evil. For all the good it does us, cyberspace has its dark sides too. Unlike conventional communities though, there are no policemen patrolling the information superhighway, leaving it open to everything from Trojan horses and viruses to cyber stalking, trademark counterfeiting and cyber terrorism.

To be continued