By EDDIE OSIFELO
ATTORNEY General, John Muria Junior is hoping to see the draft of the cyber crime bill ready before the end of this year.
The Bill aims to deal with cyber bullying, money laundering, and the use of electronic medium to commit crimes.
It would make it illegal to use electronic means to coerce, to intimidate, to harass or cause substantial emotion distress to anybody and people in this country.
Muria Junior said there are number of ministries that came together to form a taskforce and the police is one of them.
He said the whole policy or rational behind the bill encapsulates development on the law of privacy, data protection, child online protection, admissibility of electronic evidence on what define threats online.
“Also, Freedom of Information, to deal with areas of law,” he said.
Further to that, he said it is difficult to define communication, how to capture technology like verbal, written, nonverbal, gesture?
He said those are current work that are going on.
In addition, Minister of Communication and Aviation, Peter Shanel Agovaka said cyberbullying is very imminent today in Honiara.
He said this is to do with sending messages by means through texts, SMS to someone, and hacking to someone’s personal data, being rude or mean to someone online, spreading secrets and rumours about people online.
“These are cyberbullying, it causes social effects on people, and it is something government would like to address by creating or coming up with cybercrime bill.
“We start with sim card registration,” he said.
Shanel said Sim Card registration is very important in that way they are able to track people down who are causing cyber bullying online, actually find the numbers and find who they are on the registered Sim Card.
The draft Bill will go through caucus and Cabinet before being tabled in Parliament for deliberation with Bills and Legislative Committee and first reading, second reading and passage of it.
