Cyber Hate-Crime- The setting and the current responses:

According to the US Congress, Hate Crime is defined as "the defendant's conduct was motivated by hatred, bias, or prejudice, based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity of another individual or group of individuals" (HR 4797). Later the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act added disabilities to the list. There are stringent legislative measures to prevent people from practicing hate crime.

Internet being such an open and huge media unfortunately has the scope to carry out these crimes in a bigger way than the normal. Cyber hate crime can be explained as practicing hate crime by using Internet as the media. Internet offers a huge space and the fact being that there are no definite cyber laws to punish people or to make people stop practicing these crimes. It appears to be the best place for one to execute such hatred.

And also anonymity plays a vital role to help people escape the laws in the internet. A person using a nickname or an alias can post a message on the internet and thus hiding his identity from the internet users. Therefore the law cannot be enforced on any pinpointed individual. Similarly setting up the servers in different countries may make the person escape the jury because the cyber laws of different countries are not exactly the same.

Some of the examples of hate crime on the net as of today include, creating websites that contain racial remarks, anti-Semitic remarks, anti-ethnic remarks, politically motivated remarks. Since these websites are viewed by the entire public without any limitation, they tend to create an influence on people who may or may not necessarily support the remarks.

Here are some examples quoted from the Blog Site of the American university, Brandeis University, mybrandeis.edu:

“So I was playing a game of Savage online the other day and this guy joins the game, calling himself "JEW KILLER." Offended, I target him specifically and beat him up a few times until the game ends. Today he and some anti semite friends joined the game, but this time I wasn't the only jew there. Needless to say we grouped together to defend ourselves.”

*************

“I don't see a lot of anti-Semitism in real life. Too much of my free time is spent online however and I see way too much of it there. I think Jews get bashed on the internet more than all the other groups combined and I have no explanation as to why. If anyone could shed some light on the situation I'd appreciate it.”

*************

“I'm no expert, but IMHO it has something to do with the relative anonymity of the internet. Sure, there are ways of finding someone's IP address and from there finding their true identity, but the fact that it's not blatant allows people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise. There's a similar theory about why people are willing to do things in a uniform that they'd never do in real life. The anonymity of a disguise or uniform masks who they really are, thus allowing them to do things that their "normal" personality would not. Again, I'm not an expert...”

A UK based e-mail filtering company Surf control which revealed the fact that the number of hate and violence website has grown up by 300% since 2000(courtesy www.theregister.co.uk, www.electricnews.net). The company further stated that in 2000 there was about 2,756 websites that was categorized as hate and violence sites. Whereas by April 2004, there were about 10,926.

Even more interesting fact was that the growth of these websites could be noted by the fact that since January 2004 to March 2004 the rise in the percentage was about 25% whereas the entire rise in Crime was in the whole year 2003 was only 30%

The firm also justified the fact that the existing hate sites have expanded in a much bigger way then expected. For eg., the sites which contained only normal phrases of violence and other such activities now contained some graphic images of the dead and mutilated human beings and also some dreaded incidents that have shocked the whole world.

Defacing of Websites:

Another important cyber hate crime is the defacement of the website. The defacement of the website can be considered a hate crime if it consists of any form of hate messages. Defacement means altering the content of a website by illegally tampering its content and therefore making the organization at a loss.

In August 2003,hundreds of Indian websites were defaced by a pro-Pakistan hacker group and the main motive of this defacement was the anti Indian policy of the hacker’s group and in retaliation hundreds of Pakistani websites were defaced by Indian hackers. In 2001 there were incidents of constant defacement of Chinese websites by the U.S. and the U.S. websites by Chinese. Recently after the infamous cartoon row there were reports that the Danish and the U.S. websites were constantly defaced by the Muslim extremists group. Defacements of Israeli websites and Russian websites by defacers to support terrorist organizations existing in the countries.

Current Responses:

The main mission statements of organizations fighting hate crimes are as follows, as found in their website:

· uniting organisations fighting against cyber hate

· exchanging information to enhance effectivity of such organisations

· lobbying for international legislation to combat discrimination on Internet

· support groups and institutions who want to set up a complaints bureau

· create awareness and promote attitude change about discrimination on the internet by giving information, education

· to start and maintain the website www.inach.net for the network and by

· any other means that are helpful to reach the goal.

Cyber Crime Units: As suggested by Paul A. Curtis, (Sergeant – Arkansas State Police Criminal Justice Institute, Director: Dr. Lee Colwell, School Of Law Enforcement Supervision in November 12, 2000) is one of the many ways to prevent cyber crime. These units with adequate powers must also be able to tackle cyber hate crime.

First of all creating cyber crime units requires huge investment, and techno savvy participants. Apart from this a strong judicial backdrop is required to support these units because after some tough work by the police and after collecting sensitive evidence there should be some law through which action can be taken. The unit must be maintained on a national basis and also proper labs and environment must be set up to train the units.

Ways to combat hate crime:

Revamping License and agreement and Terms of service between the service providers and the webmasters:

Majority of them don’t even go through the license. They blindly accept the license by giving the ‘Next’ or the ‘Accept’ command. In some agreement he has to click on a radio button which means he has accepted the agreements. Thus there is a scenario where a webmaster accepts all the laws, terms of service, agreement but is not aware of many or any legal issues contained in them and the point to note here is, the acceptors are bound by these issues.

Therefore if there is a law which may state that propagating hate crime through website, e-mail, chat or forum is illegal; it is impossible that it will be noticed by a webmaster during his acceptance of the agreements.

So what can we actually make so that the webmaster really understands what he is agreeing on?

• It is a well known fact that the legal procedures which the webmaster signs is a very long document and it is necessary for the document to contain all the legal issues so it is impossible for one to reduce the agreement to a single page.

Therefore the very first page which he views and the page on which (in some pages where he has to check a radio button) he has to click the ‘Next’ button or ‘Agree’ button, certain points can be highlighted. There can be a sentence in a bigger font size then the other text and in bold conveying the main important legal issues to the webmaster.

The remaining agreement can follow the highlighted text. In this way there is a very good probability that the user will read them before accepting them. In case of certain users who are actually going to hire the space for creating hate website, this may serve as a warning.

• An E-Mail should be sent to the user from the webmaster stating very clearly some of the important and sensitive legal issues and it should be made compulsory for the user to acknowledge the email sent by the web service provider.

• In case of forums and chat where there are constant changes in the contents implementing this may not be the remedy. But there can be a constant reviewing of the material and may be using a text filter the harm full content can be deleted and the user can be denied permission to use the chat or the forum.

• There can also be cases where certain blogs can be created just for the sake of propagating cyber hate. In this case also, the above proposed ideas can be a bit difficult to maintain because of the immense volume of the blogs. Again these blogs can be made safer if they are verified using a text and graphics filter before being hosted on the web.

International setup to monitor cyber crime: The internet is growing at a very rapid pace and as discussed earlier it is a dream come true for all the racial abusers and those propagating hate crime. Right now there is no world wide organization that can define the security measures on the Internet and also to prescribe a set of dos and don’ts on the internet.

Therefore as recommended earlier, there should be an International setup to monitor the cyber crime. Internet is a global phenomenon which exists in almost all the countries in the world, therefore the international setup may be constituted by national setups existing in various countries.

This national setup should be the organization which will regulate internet in their respective countries. While forming these organizations there should be a special sub-committee to deal specifically on cyber hate. At present the INACH is doing a very good job and they must be given extensive powers on dealing with Cyber Hate.

Setting up certain parameters on the servers and browsers based on which the websites will be closed: We need to have certain parameters that has the capability of discriminating hate websites and other activities that propagate hate on the internet. If these parameters are effective and result oriented, then they can be used on the servers hosting websites.

Global Hate Index, projects like that must be given importance and can be used on the servers. The GHI must be used to scan all the pages the servers host and the Index should be monitored. There should be a cut-off index. Those websites that has an index higher than that of the cut off index must be shut down automatically. This can be of great use because this type of index is not going to be biased and is going to be an automatic one.

Creating a helpline and to encourage people to report online hate: One more proposed idea is to have a helpline where users can regularly report over the phone or through e-mail about hate content on the Internet. This can be a very good solution if implemented.

The number and e-mail should be advertised and must reach almost everyone.

Creating awareness through ads on the internet and education: There should be a constant urge to create awareness to the public about the rise of hatred content on the Internet. The general public should also be told about the growing trends in cyber hate and how dangerous it can become in the future. Therefore all the websites or at least the popular websites should contains ads stating that hatred content is bad and should advice people from not getting involved with the hate content on the internet.

Also reports showed that a large number of the hate websites involve adolescent and teenagers. Therefore there should be a compulsory ethical training, teaching them what is bad and what should not be done over the internet, especially there should be some emphasis that urge the children to refrain from committing hate crime on the internet.

posted by visveshwar @ 9/28/2006 02:08:00 pm Comments: 0