Legal Aspects of Internet Governance - Essay Example

? Legal Aspects of Internet Governance Legal Aspects of Internet Governance Introduction Hacking and other forms of illegal activities related to computer and internet through which mankind experience huge amount of issues have spread over the past few years of time period. Various forms of internet related issues have been figured out such as cyber terrorism, war, defense and insecurity of information. Policy makers and researchers have tried to counter this problem, but while countering this problem they have to keep in mind various challenges such as right to privacy, autonomy, freedom of expression and communication, access to information and data. The aim of this paper is to browse through the various legal aspects of internet governance that help minimize the concerns related to internet. Body Nature of the problem Both the private sector as well as the government sector has become very concerned about cyber security and these concerns have elevated due to various sources. These sources include: Individuals and groups have accepted the importance of internet as it is found to be present in different spheres of human life. Computer systems and information technology related resources have become increasingly dependant on internet. Concern has even elevated because quite frequently, organizations from both the private and the public world report breach of information. Different types of viruses and malwares are spreading and they are becoming quite complex for people from the industry to tackle. Government is continuously involved in the process of conducting investigative operations on the way internet is being used. Various internet related attacks conducted throughout the world. Concerns have even stemmed out of activities such as cybercrime which includes: theft of identity, credit card online frauds, illegal pornography, and loss of property that is intellectual in nature. On top of the sources of concern is the concern for privacy of data that is with the government and the private sector. Internet users have increased and almost 32.7% of the world’s population is using internet, but they are unaware of the threats they may face and their awareness of how to avoid such threats is even low in amount (International Business Publications, 2007, p.38). These users are recognized as soft targets and a number of criminal entities can take advantage of them. Those entities that may pose a threat to users include: hackers, government organizations, especially intelligence agencies. The motives behind attacks related to internet includes: economic benefits, attacks conducted for the betterment of the security of the nation and self satisfaction. Responses from international community The international community and the local community have responded in several ways to the threats and the attackers. During the period of 2001, COE (Council of Europe) held a treaty signing session on the subject of cyber terrorism. The meeting focused on three major problems related to cybercrime (Bachmaier, 2010, p.203). These issues included: various kinds of cyber attacks that nations need to address in their laws and regulations, the adoption of these rules and regulations to solve major issues and corporation between nations to solve the issue of cybercrime. The convention has made ample amount of progress and it has been able to add 21 countries to the convention and tried to persuade a total of 30 countries to get into the agreement (Bachmaier, 2010, p.203). During the period of 2010 a UN Crime Congress was held in the area of Salvador, here Brazil tried to get other nations into signing a treaty to counter cybercrime (Boister, 2012, p.118). Brazil failed to persuade other nations to sign the treaty even though heated discussions took place and problems were discussed in great lengths. The reason due to which agreement was not reached includes concern for rights of humans, national security and other issues. The problematic question in such cases is how to bridge the differences among these nations while ensuring the human rights and national security and privacy are preserved while analyzing how these agreements will affect the new technologies that are coming into existence. Various methods have been proposed to address these questions, for example: the Council of Europe Data Protection Convention have tried to research new methods through which privacy and security related concerns are addressed when information is transferred from one border to another (Council of Europe, 2009, p.83). Another example is the models for countries cybercrime related legal side have been proposed in accordance to the convention that took place in Budapest (Ghosh, 2010, p.338). COE states that around 100 nations have made adjustments and additions to their constitutions to counter cybercrime legally (Council of Europe, 2009, p.83). Increase in cybercrime even increase issues related to criminal justice that the criminal justice system has been fighting for several years. For example: Recent issues have taken place between US and the UK due to cybercrime related issues (Kshetri, 2010, p.2). Response from private and the public ends Private sector is the leading owner and user of computer infrastructure, even the internet and telephone lines used to operate the internet is in the hands of the private sector. The remaining portion of infrastructure is owned and controlled by government and government agencies and both the private and the government sector’s infrastructure is linked with each other. In order to make the infrastructure of the government sector and the private sector and the linked government and private sector infrastructure is to adopt methods of protection and security. Security needs to be adopted to ensure that illegal and unwanted access does not take place and prevention activities need to be conducted after the attack has taken place. The private sector has made various moves to protect its information technology infrastructure by joining hands with the international community. These efforts can be witnessed through the treaties signed by the private sector and creation of entities such as IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) (Makofske, 2003, p.174). The issue of highest concern is the role government is playing in developing standards for the protection and governance of internet. A great example of a joint venture between the government and the private sector for the security of the infrastructure is the acceptance of use of security extensions in order to protect the domain name system. This measure has provided ample amount of security from cyber crime and this measure was taken by ICANN (Raghavan, 2011, p.74). Governments of several nations have joined with private entities such as education outlets and have created bodies that assist the agencies of government and the private entities in defending attacked launched through internet and to protect internet vulnerabilities. These bodies are denoted as CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Teams), their main function is security and prevention of attacks and their secondary function is to promote cooperation between the public and the private sectors (United States, 2008, p.26). One such organization is named The Forum of Incident Response and Security Team, this organization is a non profit entity and their business is to improve the cooperation among teams such as CERTs and the organization has been able to successfully included 200 similar teams as members and these teams come from 28 different nations throughout the world (United States, 2008, p.26). The CERTs group, operating from European nations has a total of 11 such teams and the main aim of all these teams is to manage internet related vulnerability (United States, 2008, p.26). Response from military ends During the period of 2010, the general secretary of ITU proposed while he was attending the World Economic Forum in the region of Davos that all nations should come into an agreement that no nation will conduct an internet attack on another nation (Chhabra, 2013, p.101). The debate continued for a long period of time during the conference, but the participants never clearly understood what a war conducted through cyber space is and what are the correct responses to avoid such a war between nations. The central issue of the debate was that how law of war is to be understood in cyber context. For example: it is quite hard to distinguish whether the attack has been conducted by a civilian or it is a military attack and whether to fight the war, civilians will be targeted or the military. The debate even focused on what would be the best response for such attacks and who would be responding such attacks and against whom these responses will be carried out. Lastly the debate even focused on the difficulty in distinguishing whether the attack was conducted through the means of bot or humans. Similar issues have been discussed and debated in different forums, for example: report created by NATO stated recommendations to bring alterations in the definition of Cyber attack and would lead to a legal NATO action under Section 5 (Collins, 2011, p.110). Local and domestic level response Cooperation between the international communities is very essential to stop cyber related crimes and wars, similarly at the domestic level; proper planning needs to be conducted by nations. Actions at the local level are important in order to safeguard local level threats and pursue security of national cyber. In order to create safe cyber space, coordination between private sector, society, government and sub government entities is of utmost importance. The United States government has made a move to avoid cyber related crimes and attacks taking place on national level, they have developed a strategy for this purpose, recognized as CNCI (Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative) (Rollins, 2009). The main aim of the strategy is to first safeguard and protect the cyber infrastructure of the government itself. They have not yet created plans regarding the safeguard of infrastructure owned and controlled by the private sector. Another example of response on national level against cyber threats is the Critical Infrastructure Protection, this is Europe based program. The program has made it compulsory for the European nations to adopt the guidelines of the program in their national rules and regulations. An important element that needs to be addressed in response strategy by the government and the private community is to create methods of detecting unwanted and illegal intrusions. Concerns Economy of nation as well as economy of world is at risk due to the threat of cybercrimes as well as cyber wars. The cost of designing and developing methods to avoid cyber issues is quite high, international community needs to join hands together to ensure that the best mechanism is created to stop activities such as cyber wars. Rules and regulations regarding information needs to be tightened to ensure that privacy of individuals are not at high risk, if information of individuals will be at high risk, economic activity is automatically destined to decline. Conclusion Internet governance is a major issue as a huge amount of population may become affected if cyber crimes and attacks increase, the international community, private and the public sector need to address these issues on national and both international levels. The international community has tried to create treaties so different nations can work together for better internet governance, but most of these treaties have failed due to the issue of human rights and security of the nations. The private sector as well as the public sector has even made certain measures to solve the issue of cyber crime, they have even joined hands together to avoid the problem and to restrict its damage. Military has even made its moves to stop a war based on cyber space but they have not yet figured out that who the attackers are and who should be attacked in response. The concerns caused by internet governance range from socio, political and economical issues. References Bachmaier, L., & Moral, G. A. (2010). Criminal law in Spain. Austin: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. Boister, N. (2012). An introduction to transnational criminal law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chhabra, S. (2013). ICT influences on human development, interaction, and collaboration. 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