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The openness of the Internet is both its best asset and worst liability. Its capacity to promote technical innovation, which has been such a succes...
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The openness of the Internet is both its best asset and worst liability. Its capacity to promote technical innovation, which has been such a success, renders it simultaneously open to exploitation by unscrupulous, profit-minded criminals in what amounts to a lawless free-for-all. Originally designed as a means of ensuring continued communications in the event of a nuclear war destroying the conventional telecommunications infrastructure, the Internet now also represents an instrument with which one can damage the new information society in unprecedented ways. From cell phones to pocket PCs, the more data that becomes available, the more it is monitored, and hence the more susceptible one dependent on the data becomes to cyber terrorism. With its digital facilities from fiber optic communications to satellites and sophisticated software production, the United States and other advanced industrialized countries lie open to cyber terrorism much more than do developing countries whose primitive infrastructures make them impervious to attack.
Cyber connectivity is the lubricant and catalyst for ever more sophisticated and elusive organized crimes. But it is also the means by which law enforcement authorities worldwide seek new ways to stabilize the growth of crime, if not retard it. One way to hamper the activities of such criminals is to quickly detect laundered money and confiscate the proceeds of organized crime. Computerized bank records are easily monitored.
The Catch-22 of international cyber security is clear: cyber crime stems from the increasing interconnectedness of states, but authorities are hampered in combating it in part because of some states’ lack of Internet access. It is difficult to coax sovereign countries with primitive computer systems to promulgate sophisticated cyber laws. Yet the global nature of organized crime necessitates a proactive and cooperative international approach.
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