RI in need of cyber law: Experts
JAKARTA (JP): Information technology (IT) and legal experts reiterated on Tuesday the urgency of a cyber law in Indonesia to anticipate future disputes.
Legal expert Edmon Makarim from the Law Institute for Technology Studies at the University of Indonesia's School of Law said that beside hackers, there had been some cases of domain brokers in the country.
A broker is someone who registers a well-known name as a domain, such as a private TV station or cosmetics producer.
They then attempt to sell, at a high price, the domain name to the real company, which is unable to register its name because it has already been registered.
"No one can punish them as there are no laws stipulating the crime in the cyber world," Edmon said in a seminar on the threat of a cyber war.
An IT expert and lecturer at Gajah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Roy Suryo, said that the legal system in Indonesia had the characteristic of lex loci delicti, or covering the area, evidence, place and physical action of the crime, which is contradictory to conditions in cyberspace.
"The law means that cyber crimes should be punished in the cyber world and executed by cyber police, which of course is nonsense," Roy said.
According to Roy, the number of Indonesians who have access to the Internet is some 0.6 percent of the whole population, and trade through the Internet is not booming here.
"But technology accelerates so fast that we have to prepare and promote," he said.
Roy told of the case of a 15-year-old Indonesian boy who was apprehended by the Singaporean Police Computer Crime Branch at a relative's apartment in Singapore in June after it was discovered he had hacked into the computer program of a Singaporean research and development institute.
The boy, who was a student in Singapore at the time, was released on S$10,000 (US$7,000) bail.
Roy suggested the establishment of an agency to monitor Internet use in Indonesia. The agency should involve experts of education, law, IT and government, he said. (09)