Cybercrime Conference—London

London is hosting the annual e-Crime Congress today and tomorrow “to find new methods to fight … cyber predators.”^[1] It’s been a booming year for e-crime, with phishing and identity theft attempts “ris[ing] to number about 8 million per day,” and “E-scams are costing businesses billions and that doesn’t include increasing funds—about 20 to 50 percent of total expenditures in the US and UK—to beef up security.”^[2]

Cybercrime is the field of criminal law that has the strongest amount of public-private collaboration.^[3] That is why the e-Crime Congress will be attended by “about 500 officials from governments, companies [such] as Amazon, eBay, Skype and Yahoo, bankers from Scandinavia, the UK and the Middle East and law enforcement such as the FBI, Scotland Yard, and those from … China.”^[4]

The conference will touch on seven “structured themes”:

• the State of the Nation;
• Identity Theft;
• The Shadow Economy & Counterfeit Networks;
• Selling Security to the Board;
• Intelligence Gathering and Forensics;
• a Law Enforcement Round Table; and
• New Technologies—New Threats.^[5]

Secondary topics to be discussed at the conference include hacking and extortion, brand protection from copyright and trademark infringement, consumer awareness, industrial espionage, network security, technological advances, and best practices.

Currently, the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime is sitting on the Senate’s Executive Calendar, having been reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with 6 reservations and 5 declarations. The Convention requires ratifying countries to make their domestic laws conform to the substantive provisions found in the Convention. These provisions are:

• Illegal Access: Accessing a computer system without right is illegal.
• Illegal Interception: Intercepting the transmission of computer data without right is illegal.
• Data Interference: Deletion, alteration, or suppression of computer data is illegal.
• System Interference: Interfering with the operation of a computer system is illegal.
• Misuse of Devices: In general, providing methods of committing the previous three offenses is illegal.
• Computer-Related Forgery: Causing the creation of inauthentic data with the intent that the data be used as authentic is generally illegal.
• Computer-Related Fraud: Causing the loss of property by using a computer is illegal.
• Offences Related to Child Pornography: Using Computers to produce, offer, distribute, procure, or possess child pornography is illegal.
• Offences Related to Infringements of Copyright and Related Rights: Each party must enact the various international IP frameworks, and make infringement done with a computer illegal.^[6]

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[1] Conference Seeks to Strengthen Fight Against E-Crime, Deutsche Welle, Mar. 30, 2006.
[2] Id.
[3] See, e.g., our post discussing Microsoft’s efforts to help law enforcement agencies here.
[4] DW, supra note 1.
[5] E-Crime Congress, The 2006 e-Crime Congress, last visited Mar. 30, 2006.
[6] Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, Nov. 23, 2001, Ch. II., E.T.S No. 185, S. Treaty Doc. No. 108-11