Worldwide, nations have been forced to introduce legal frameworks and regulations to ensure cyber sovereignty for themselves and data security and privacy for their netizens, after the pandemic-triggered a data deluge on the Internet which dramatically increased vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, said legal luminaries and cyber experts who spoke online at an international conference on Cyberlaw, Cybercrime and Cybersecurity that concluded on Friday.
Technology should find a way to accurately identify actors who violate the norms of the Internet and infringe upon personal data privacy and governmental security and sovereignty, said Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.
“It is critical that we have a way to identify people who violate the rules of the Internet, the data super highway,” said Mr. Cerf, who is considered one of the ‘fathers of the Internet’. “It could be something like a driving license, and violations are trackable and violators are easily identifiable,” he added.
Globally, nations lost some $6 trillion to cybercrimes in 2020 and such losses are estimated to exceed $8 trillion in 2021. Cybersecurity issues have emerged as a top concern for several governments and, as a result, 63% of the countries globally are planning to come up with cyberprivacy-related legislation by 2023, as per Gartner Research.
Cyberlaw was a constantly evolving paradigm and therefore most governments were working on holistic legal approaches to safeguard their critical information infrastructure (CIS) and protect digital liberties and rights of netizens, said Pavan Duggal, President, Cyberlaws.Net, cyberlaw expert and author of several books on cyber regulations.
“Newly evolving technologies are increasingly putting the focus back on pushing the envelope of cyberlegal jurisprudence across the world. So, nations have realised the importance of creating distinctive sub-disciplines of law under the cyberlaw umbrella such as cybersecurity, cybercrime, law for artificial intelligence, blockchain and IoT, etc.,” added Mr. Duggal.
Commenting on the issue of cryptocurrency, Justice Madan B. Lokur, retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, said the issues around cryptocurrency in India ‘required far deeper discussions and deliberations... not just talks in the governmental and judicial level, but also in the public level, involving the laymen’.
“The government is planning to bring a bill, but is there sufficient understanding about cryptocurrency, and is the proposed regulation prepared in consultation with the general public who will be the actual participants in a cryptoeconomy,” asked Justice Lokur.
Raising serious concerns about AI (artificial intelligence) deployments for judicial decisions, he said, the plans to use AI to speed up decision making and to reduce the backlog in courts was a good thought, but wondered if AI, without a human face, could actually deliver justice.
