Internet Space Pirate Peter Graham Daley
Cybercrooks breach unguarded borders of cyberspace
By Jim Loney
MIAMI, Oct. 5 (Reuters) - From computer geeks and pornographers to Russian mafia and Asian crime triads, cybercrooks are uploading and downloading stolen, counterfeit and contraband goods on the Internet, law enforcement and security sources say.
Unlike the days when rum runners and drug smugglers risked life and limb to move illicit merchandise by land, sea and air, thieves who steal computer software, music, video and other digitized intellectual property can move it across national frontiers without leaving the comfort of their desks.
Hailed as a powerful boon to global trade, the Internet is proving a bane to police trying to prevent criminal masterminds from trafficking stolen goods across the unguarded borders of cyberspace, law enforcement experts say.
''I think it's going to dwarf every type of crime in the next millennium,'' Assistant U.S. Customs Commissioner Bonni Tischler said at an international symposium for customs officials last week. ''They're going to have to figure out how to control the Internet.''
Gone are the days when Cold War spies swapped an attache case or Manila envelope in a clandestine rendezvous on a speeding train or smuggled microdots secreted in their dental fillings. Purloined papers, terrorist manifestoes and pornographic pictures now are dispatched with a keystroke.
U.S. companies have estimated they lose $200 billion a year to product piracy -- from the theft of trademarked goods such as designer clothing, shoes and handbags to illegally duplicated software programmes, CDs and videos, U.S. agents say.
11 BILLION LOST TO PIRACY WORLDWIDE
The global software industry lost $11 billion to piracy in 1998, with an estimated 38 percent of 615 million new business software applications installed worldwide pirated, the Software and Information Industry Association trade group says.
It estimates 97 percent of business software applications used in Vietnam in 1998 were pirated. China, Oman, Lebanon, Russia, Indonesia and Bulgaria all had rates above 90 percent.
A survey by SIIA in August estimated that 60 percent of the software being auctioned online was illegitimate -- some of it on Internet auction giant eBay as well as ZDNet and Excite.
U.S. law enforcement officials concede no one knows how much stolen intellectual property moves over the Internet, but they believe the numbers would be staggering -- and growing.
''I don't think any of us can define how big the Internet can get, so the crimes that go along with it and the fraud perpetrated by it are infinitesimal,'' said D.C. Page, managing director of security firm Kroll Associates.
For intellectual property, the Internet is the perfect criminal arena because it creates huge jurisdictional loopholes for police and prosecutors, agents and security experts say.
''You can see a fraud being perpetrated between the United States and Brazil where the actual perpetrators are in Amsterdam. How is that ever going to be prosecuted by any one of those three governments? There are evidentiary issues, there are witnesses, there are legal issues,'' Page said.
''A lot of times these guys are going to set up house in a jurisdiction that is going to be favourable to them,'' he said. ''We've found people actually put their server in the country where they're best protected.''
In addition to being used to ship stolen property, the Internet can be used to elude authorities in other ways. For example, if police are closing in on a factory making fake trademarked goods -- say Gucci purses -- in Korea, the operator can quickly shut his factory and ship the digitized trademarks via Internet to a new clandestine plant in China.
Internet white collar crime is so easy that mobsters in Asia and in former Soviet bloc countries are using it finance other enterprises, Customs officials said.
PIRATED MERCHANDISE FINANCES MORE VIOLENT CRIMES
''We find that the Asian triads have been using the sale of pirated merchandise to finance their more violent crimes,'' said Mark Robinson, U.S. Customs director of fraud investigations.
Former Soviet bloc countries are hotbeds of Internet crime, officials said. Computer mavens make use of chaotic politics and lax enforcement to run lucrative smuggling operations.
Law enforcement officials say intellectual property makers, from software companies such as Microsoft to music producers such as Sony, must build antitheft devices into their goods. ''The whole issue is how to keep people from downloading over the Internet,'' Tischler said.
Yet the concept of making it tougher to download products runs counter to the visions of many firms to sell and move products in cyberspace, particularly music that can be downloaded onto recordable CDs from Web sites.
And the criminal possibilities will only get bigger as technology improves, with better quality and smaller recordable CDs and sharper Internet video, officials said.
Customs officials say judicial systems lag behind exploding crime on the Internet. Cybercrime is difficult for juries to visualize, penalties are small and the risk of jail is minimal in comparison to crimes like armed robbery.
''The law is so far behind the Internet,'' Page said.
Mike Flynn, SIIA manager of Internet and international antipiracy, said cybercrooks quickly find ways to circumvent technological security devices.
''It's really about changing the mind-set of people to make them more respectful of intellectual property rights,'' he said. ''There are always going to be people who will insist on breaking the law.''
22:05 10-04-99 |
