CBI is reported to have released a press release with the
following information.
PTI [ SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 2002 3:35:05 PM ]
NEW DELHI:
In the first ever cyber crime case of
e-mail spamming from the country, the CBI (India's
Central Bureau of Investigation) has booked a school
dropout teenager who had been bombarding a UK-based
company with e-mails.
The cyber crime cell of the CBI received a complaint
from a web-hosting company in the United Kingdom that
it was receiving thousands of e-mails from India, an
agency spokesman said here on Saturday.
In the spam mails, the accused had been asking the
"complainant to shut down one of the websites being
hosted from the company's server and threatened to
span the service provider by sending porn e-mails in
case the website was not deleted," the spokesman said.
He said these spam e-mails had occupied more than four
megabytes of the space on the server, for a period of
two-three days, causing a loss to his company as it
was unable to transact any business.
The CBI traced the sender of the mails to Pondichery
and conducted searches and found the accused to be a
16-year-old teenager, a school dropout and an Internet
addict.
The agency has registered a case against him under
Sections 507 and 509 of IPC and Section 66 of Information Technology Act,
2000."
While Spam is considered an "Offence" and needs to be
addressed by law enforcement people, the above news report raises many issues
which need discussion.
While appreciating the CBI 's alacrity in arresting a
teenager for the alleged spam based on a complaint from a UK firm, it is
necessary to reflect if this is a standard response of the agency or a
special response. If it is a special response, the public would like to know
some more details of the case to understand what prompted the special response.
naavi.org has been highlighting the Cyber Porn spam bombarding
of the Indian community from many international web servers. These are crimes
committed against the Indian community whom the CBI is duty bound to protect
and these are incidents which are well within the jurisdiction of CBI. In one
recent case, a
note was also sent to CBI requesting action against the domain owner
www.netian.com who was apparently
facilitating the spam mails.
It was however regrettable to note that CBI did not seem to
act in this case when thousands of ordinary Indian citizens were subjected to
pornographic harassment. Similarly, spam mails trying to peddle drugs in the
Chennai market were also left unattended.
If these were not fit cases for investigation and action,
what was there in the complaint of an English firm for CBI to swing into
action so swiftly?. If this is how CBI can be mobilized into action, we need
to request other English firms to file cases on behalf of Indian Citizens
against the Pornographic spam mails.
Focussing more on the case on hand, the press release
states that the accused had requested the server owner to remove a web site.
Which is this web site? Is it a pornographic web site? ( Is it
www.tamilsex.com?) Is it a terrorist
web site? Is it an anti Hindu web site? is it an anti Muslim web site?.
It would be interesting to know.
Coming to specific nature of the crime as alleged, it
appears that CBI has booked a case of "Criminal Intimidation" and "Hacking".
Generally, "Spam" is considered sending "Unsolicited
E-Mails" particularly without source identification.
The present instance does not indicate if the source of
e-mails were not identified. It is also not clear how "hacking" fits into this
crime.
As in other instances, in a bid to file the "First" case on
"Spamming" in India, CBI seems to have made its own assumptions about the
crime and netted perhaps another teen age prankster.
It is high time we grow up and start differentiating
between "Crimes" and "Nuisance" and keep our priorities right.
Coming back to the main theme of this discussion, will CBI
now take action against real spam cases which are resulting in the harassment
of Indians in India?
Naavi
March 23, 2002
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