Team completes draft on RI's first cyber law

JAKARTA (JP): A special team of academics from the Bandung Institute of Technology and the University of Padjajaran has completed a draft on Indonesia's first law on cyber crimes and will present it to the government in October.

Head of the cyber law drafting team Ahmad M. Ramli said on Monday that the draft would be presented to the director general of posts and telecommunications who will forward it to the Minister of Transportation Agum Gumelar.

"The government will first have to study the draft with other telecommunications experts and the Indonesian consumer agency, before it is enacted into law," he said on the sidelines of a seminar on Internet banking.

The law would address crimes dealing with the Internet such as credit card fraud and signature fraud that sometimes occurs during transactions on the Internet, Ahmad said.

It would also address privacy definitions on the Net such as how a company should handle confidential information of its customers over the Net, he said.

Punishment for cyber crimes would not be as harsh as for crimes made in the "real world", Ahmad said, explaining that many cyber crimes were committed by people without a lot of money and therefore the fine should be within their capacity to pay.

The law would differentiate crimes committed intentionally for profit and those committed unintentionally and that jail terms would be limited to between two to four years depending on the seriousness of the crime, he said.(tnt)