BENGALURU: With a British media report claiming that the man behind the most influential pro-Islamic State Twitter account is from the IT city, the need for a proper social media monitoring system has come to the fore.
The National Cyber Security Policy 2013 is just a paper tiger and it has not been implemented yet. Also no proper mechanism is in place to hold the stakeholders responsible for the crime, which could transcend countries and borders.
“Terrorists strike at the roots of our sovereignty. We are pretty lost in the woods as far as cyber terrorism is concerned, which presently is an offence under Section 66 of the Information Technology Act. There are several legal challenges. We need both legal and cyber-savvy experts to deal with this issue. We cannot fight cyber terrorism with a single legal provision. So we also need to have several procedures in place,” said Supreme Court advocate and noted cyber law expert Pavan Duggal.
There is a huge need for capacity building in police, legal and technical fields.
Several legal experts said there has been no reported case of present legal provision being invoked in cyber terror cases (from 2008 till date).
According to them, regulation of social media is very tough as most of the stakeholders are located outside the country.
“We need to flex our political muscles and then go in for tackling cyber crimes. To tackle cyber crime, there is a need to address the shortage of security programmers as well. The role and responsibility of the stakeholders in the event of social media being utilised for criminal and terrorist activities should also be defined,” legal experts said.
‘Monitoring internet mammoth task’
Bengaluru: It is possible to intercept and monitor chatter on social media sites, verify email accounts, messages, images and blogs. But for this, a combination of tools, techniques, massive investment and legal clearance is needed, according to government and cyber security experts. “Tracking of cyberspace has been going on. To a large extent, security agencies have been able to neutralise possible attacks. Even for the city police, it is possible to intercept accounts of suspected individuals and groups, but not on a largescale. One needs experts and specialised tools for this, which is very costly and difficult for a country like India,” said a government-employed technical expert, responsible for installation of satellite monitoring system for intelligence gathering.