While international cooperation among different countries is necessary to tackle cyber crimes, it is difficult to have universally accepted law, cyber security expert from the United States, Melissa Hathaway, said here on Thursday.
Ms Hathaway who had earlier worked on cyber security with two the U.S. Presidents – George W Bush and Barack Obama -- was in the city and interacted with representatives of start-ups at the Nasscom warehouse (start-up centre) here and spoke to the students at Jadavpur University.
“I believe it will be very difficult to get a common view of the (cyber security) law across 196 countries; because there are different approaches, cultures, history on how we think about freedom of speech; the right to privacy and freedom & security,” Ms Hathaway, who now runs a cyber security consultancy firm Hathaway Global Strategies, said.
Commenting on the different approaches in different countries and cultures while dealing with cyber issues, the U.S. expert said that in India people do not have a problem when the corporations (service providers) have access to the information but are concerned when the government has access to it.
The situation is completely different in Europe where people do not like Corporations to have access to the information in cyber space.
On the debate centring encryption policy in India, Ms Hathaway said that while every country including the U.S. is working on it, no country should demand that the technology is weakened.
During her first visit to India, she interacted with police officials looking into complaints of cyber crime and said that her discussions were centred on the “speed with which you can investigate and prosecute” incidents of cyber crime.
Stating that “crimes happen too fast” on the internet, Ms Hathaway said “by definition international cooperation is too slow at the speed of the internet”.
Ms Hathaway said in cases where the data move to another country, the investigators need that country’s assistance to gather the evidence and deal with the crime.
“We should be able to work on machine speed on some of these things. And, not at the speed of the bureaucracy,” the expert said.
“By definition international cooperation is too slow at the speed of the internet”
