By Sheku Putka Kamara
Dennis (2003) propounded that cybercrime, also called computer crime, the use of a computer as an instrument to further illegal ends, such as committing fraud, trafficking in child pornography and intellectual property, stealing identities, or violating privacy. Cybercrime, especially through the Internet, has grown in importance as the computer has become central to commerce, entertainment, and government.
On November 17, 2021, Sierra Leone adopted a new Cybersecurity and Crime Act to regulate online transactions and communications, amidst diverse reactions. A year later, the law has begun to bite in a way that gives a jolting indication of what it holds for the freedom of expression.
Because of the early and widespread adoption of computers and the Internet in the United States, most of the earliest victims and villains of cybercrime were Americans. By the 21stcentury, though, hardly a hamlet remained anywhere in the world that had not been touched by cybercrime of one sort or another.
Defining cybercrime
New technologies create new criminal opportunities but few new types of crime. What distinguishes cybercrime from traditional criminal activity? Obviously, one difference is the use of the digital computer, but technology alone is insufficient for any distinction that might exist between different realms of criminal activity. Criminals do not need a computer to commit fraud, traffic in child pornography and intellectual property, steal an identity, or violate someone’s privacy. All those activities existed before the “cyber” prefix became ubiquitous. Cybercrime, especially involving the Internet, represents an extension of existing criminal behaviour alongside some novel illegal activities.
Most cybercrime is an attack on information about individuals, corporations, or governments. Although the attacks do not take place on a physical body, they do take place on the personal or corporate virtual body, which is the set of informational attributes that define people and institutions on the Internet. In other words, in the digital age our virtual identities are essential elements of everyday life: we are a bundle of numbers and identifiers in multiple computer databases owned by governments and corporations. Cybercrime highlights the centrality of networked computers in our lives, as well as the fragility of such seemingly solid facts as individual identity.
In Sierra Leone, in one of its earliest applications, a local artiste found himself on the wrong side of the law when he took to Facebook to insult and threaten a journalist. Alhaji Amadu Bah, popularly known as LAJ, described Asmaa James, a journalist with Freetown-based Radio Democracy as a “bastard child” threatening that “the next time I see you, I will piss on your face.”
The Facebook threat followed the journalist’s extensive coverage of a case in which the artiste was standing trial for causing public disorder and assaulting a police officer. Mrs. James filed a complaint with the police cyber-unit, and LAJ was arrested. After many critical comments on social media and a statement by the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ), the rapper posted an apology on Facebook on 13 December 2021.
While the arrest of the artiste under the Cybercrime Act projected the new law as protective of the rights of the victim, and therefore, progressive, two recent developments raised concerns about the potential abuse of the law to repress freedom of expression.
On May 26, 2022, the police detained SorieSaio Sesay, a journalist with the privately owned Okentuhun Radio FM based in Kamakwie, northern Sierra Leone. The journalist had reported at the police station after he was summoned. The police accused him of forwarding a comment to a WhatsApp group linked to Calabash Newspaper’s website. The comment was about the alleged police killing of a driver during a conflict between motorcycle taxi drivers. The police had seized Sesay’s phone before detaining him.
The journalist was later transferred to the police headquarters in Freetown, and released on bail after six days in detention.
Even while on bail, the authorities forbade him from leaving Freetown, insisting that he reports to the cybercrime unit at the police headquarters for questioning. He was finally allowed to go to his home in Kamakwie on June 6, 2022.
In the second incident, the police arrested and detained Ibrahim Kemoh Sesay, a former Minister of Transport and Aviation, and presidential aspirant for the opposition All People’s Congress (APC) party.
A police statement on April 25, 2022, said the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Headquarters was investigating Ibrahim Kemoh Sesay in connection with a video circulating on WhatsApp containing “cyber stalking and cyber bullying to wit (Inciting and Insulting messages) against the President of The Republic of Sierra Leone.”
On May 5, 2022, the former Minister was brought to court. The particulars of the offence, according to a communication from the Judiciary, was that “Kemoh Sesay between March and April 2022, through social media, via WhatsApp, in Port Loko District, Bakeloko Chiefdom in the Northern Province of the country, did wilfully and repeatedly communicate directly to the President, Dr Julius Maada Bio in a manner that he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to His Excellency President Dr Julius Maada Bio or causes such a message to be sent.”
The politician was remanded in custody at the Pademba Road male Correctional centre, until May, 9, 2022.
Sierra Leone decriminalised libel on October 28, 2020 raising hope about the end of the era of frivolous prosecutions. Until its repeal, the Public Order Act 1965 had been used to harass and persecute journalists and citizens who annoyed the government and other powerful people with their public remarks. Speaking at a ceremony to formally mark the repeal, President Maada Bio said “For more than half a century, we had a legislative and governance regime that criminalised journalism. Successive governments had failed to abolish this law that threatened civil liberties and had been abused over the course of half a century by successive governments.’’
The prosecution of the journalist, SorieSaio Sesay, and the politician, Kemoh Sesay, under Sierra Leone’s Cybersecurity and Crime Act raises fears that the authorities could be weaponizing the said Act to silence critics in the same way the Public Order Act 1965 was manipulated to target critical voices.
In the case of Kemoh Sesay, the charge of false publication, insult, injury, and causing hatred, ill will or needless anxiety are the classic elements of defamation. It would appear, therefore, that he is being prosecuted for defamation under cybercrime pretext. It is important to point out that the former Minister made the declarations in public and in person. However, the police did not bother him until a digital version was published on social media. It would therefore appear that the police are attacking Alhaji Sesay more for the digital publication than for the content of his speech.
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and Sierra Leone’s Media Reform Coordinating Group (MRCG) who are key proponents of the above stated findings and revelations condemned the persecution of journalist SorieSaio and politician Kemoh Sesay by authorities on the basis of the Sierra Leonean Cybersecurity and Crime Act. We urge authorities to avoid weaponizing the cybercrime law to muzzle freedom of expression and press freedom online.
An important aspect of cybercrime is its nonlocal character: actions can occur in jurisdictions separated by vast distances. This poses severe problems for law enforcement since previously local or even national crimes now require international cooperation. For example, if a person accesses child pornography located on a computer in a country that does not ban child pornography, is that individual committing a crime in a nation where such materials are illegal? Where exactly does cybercrime take place? Cyberspace is simply a richer version of the space where a telephone conversation takes place, somewhere between the two people having the conversation. As a planet-spanning network, the Internet offers criminals multiple hiding places in the real world as well as in the network itself. However, just as individuals walking on the ground leave marks that a skilled tracker can follow, cybercriminals leave clues as to their identity and location, despite their best efforts to cover their tracks. In order to follow such clues across national boundaries, though, international cybercrime treaties must be ratified.
Types of cybercrime
Cybercrime ranges across a spectrum of activities. At one end are crimes that involve fundamental breaches of personal or corporate privacy, such as assaults on the integrity of information held in digital depositories and the use of illegally obtained digital information to harass, harm, or blackmail a firm or individual. These new cyber-capabilities have caused intense debate. Pegasus spyware, for instance, according to its creator, the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group, is sold exclusively to government security and law enforcement agencies and only for the purpose of aiding rescue operations and battling criminals, such as money launderers, sex- and drug-traffickers, and terrorists. Yet, the smartphone-attached spyware, which can steal private data without leaving an obvious trace of its activities, has been widely used covertly by governments to track politicians, government leaders, human rights activists, dissidents, and journalists. It was even used to track Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi months before his murder and dismemberment by Saudi agents in October 2018. Also at this end of the spectrum is the growing crime of identity theft.
Midway along the spectrum lie transaction-based crimes such as fraud, trafficking in child pornography, digital piracy, money laundering, and counterfeiting. These are specific crimes with specific victims, but the criminal hides in the relative anonymity provided by the Internet. Another part of this type of crime involves individuals within corporations or government bureaucracies deliberately altering data for either profit or political objectives. At the other end of the spectrum are those crimes that involve attempts to disrupt the actual workings of the Internet. These range from spam, hacking, and denial of service attacks against specific sites to acts of cyberterrorism—that is, the use of the Internet to cause public disturbances and even death. Cyberterrorism focuses upon the use of the Internet by nonstate actors to affect a nation’s economic and technological infrastructure. Since the September 11 attacks of 2001, public awareness of the threat of cyberterrorism has grown dramatically.
Identity theft and invasion of privacy
Cybercrime affects both a virtual and a real body, but the effects upon each are different. This phenomenon is clearest in the case of identity theft. In the United States, for example, individuals do not have an official identity card but a Social Security number that has long served as a de facto identification number. Taxes are collected on the basis of each citizen’s Social Security number, and many private institutions use the number to keep track of their employees, students, and patients. Access to an individual’s Social Security number affords the opportunity to gather all the documents related to that person’s citizenship—i.e., to steal his identity. Even stolen credit card information can be used to reconstruct an individual’s identity. When criminals steal a firm’s credit card records, they produce two distinct effects. First, they make off with digital information about individuals that is useful in many ways. For example, they might use the credit card information to run up huge bills, forcing the credit card firms to suffer large losses, or they might sell the information to others who can use it in a similar fashion. Second, they might use individual credit card names and numbers to create new identities for other criminals. For example, a criminal might contact the issuing bank of a stolen credit card and change the mailing address on the account. Next, the criminal may get a passport or driver’s license with his own picture but with the victim’s name. With a driver’s license, the criminal can easily acquire a new Social Security card; it is then possible to open bank accounts and receive loans—all with the victim’s credit record and background. The original cardholder might remain unaware of this until the debt is so great that the bank contacts the account holder. Only then does the identity theft become visible. Although identity theft takes places in many countries, researchers and law-enforcement officials are plagued by a lack of information and statistics about the crime worldwide. Cybercrime is clearly, however, an international problem.
In 2015 the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on identity theft; in the previous year almost 1.1 million Americans had their identities fraudulently used to open bank, credit card, or utility accounts. The report also stated that another 16.4 million Americans were victimized by account theft, such as use of stolen credit cards and automatic teller machine (ATM) cards. The BJS report showed that while the total number of identity theft victims in the United States had grown by about 1 million since 2012, the total loss incurred by individuals had declined since 2012 by about $10 billion to $15.4 billion. Most of that decline was from a sharp drop in the number of people losing more than $2,000. Most identity theft involved small sums, with losses less than $300 accounting for 54 percent of the total.
Internet fraud
Schemes to defraud consumers abound on the Internet. Among the most famous is the Nigerian, or “419,” scam; the number is a reference to the section of Nigerian law that the scam violates. Although this con has been used with both fax and traditional mail, it has been given new life by the Internet. In the scheme, an individual receives an e-mail asserting that the sender requires help in transferring a large sum of money out of Nigeria or another distant country. Usually, this money is in the form of an asset that is going to be sold, such as oil, or a large amount of cash that requires “laundering” to conceal its source; the variations are endless, and new specifics are constantly being developed. The message asks the recipient to cover some cost of moving the funds out of the country in return for receiving a much larger sum of money in the near future. Should the recipient respond with a check or money order, he is told that complications have developed; more money is required. Over time, victims can lose thousands of dollars that are utterly unrecoverable.
In 2002, the newly formed U.S. Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that more than $54 million dollars had been lost through a variety of fraud schemes; this represented a threefold increase over estimated losses of $17 million in 2001. The annual losses grew in subsequent years, reaching $125 million in 2003, about $200 million in 2006, close to $250 million in 2008, and over $1 billion in 2015. In the United States the largest source of fraud is what IC3 calls “non-payment/non-delivery,” in which goods and services either are delivered but not paid for or are paid for but not delivered. Unlike identity theft, where the theft occurs without the victim’s knowledge, these more traditional forms of fraud occur in plain sight. The victim willingly provides private information that enables the crime; hence, these are transactional crimes. Few people would believe someone who walked up to them on the street and promised them easy riches; however, receiving an unsolicited e-mail or visiting a random Web page is sufficiently different that many people easily open their wallets. Despite a vast amount of consumer education, Internet fraud remains a growth industry for criminals and prosecutors. Europe and the United States are far from the only sites of cybercrime. South Korea is among the most wired countries in the world, and its cybercrime fraud statistics are growing at an alarming rate. Japan has also experienced a rapid growth in similar crimes.
Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Wednesday, February 7th, 2024 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)
