"Cybercrime" is a problem, but if you are going to fight it, which is the more fundamental problem: the nature of the Internet, or the fact that most government bodies are not culturally capable at this point of effectively doing their job of enforcing the laws online?
If we accept the fact that the greatest hurdle in arresting international cyber criminals is that various legal systems just aren't prepared to address the speed at which these crimes occur or the various nuances that are unique to computer crimes, then the question is: What can we do to fix the problem?
It's obvious that the Internet requires some type of governance. But it is just as obvious that trying to establish this governance through the numerous legal systems might not be practical. The other possibility for governing the Internet, and, more specifically, the criminal activity that occurs on the Internet, would be to change the structure of the Internet. Although I don't support ideas like the "national firewalls" put in place by some countries, this type of solution does afford some level of control over Internet traffic flowing through said country.
However, knowing all the possibilities with disguising or "spoofing" one's information on the Web, I'm not sure that there is a way to truly "protect our borders" when it comes to the Internet. The solution might be to establish two Internets -- the current Internet and a new, more secure Internet where users would be required to register prior to gaining access. Once again, though, we're confronted with the issue of what would be the governing body that would manage the user registrations? Would it be an organization similar to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) or InterNIC that would manage user registrations on the "new" Internet, or do we need to establish an entirely new entity to manage a more secure Internet?
Ironically, there is already a new, research-oriented Internet 2.0 in existence. So far, you can't find any good references to crime being committed on Internet2 because it is a walled-garden network that's not open to just anyone who wants to get in. This makes perfectly good sense when you think about it. Instead of acting as a replacement for "Internet 1.0" (at least at this point), Internet2 is a network aimed at meeting the needs of a specific group of people that doesn't interfere with the rest of us.
To some extent, the military has already done this for a while with Siprnet. There is no excuse for the departments of Justice, State, Treasury and Homeland security to have not followed the example of Defense in this respect. No excuse other than business-as-usual for government agencies. The state governments with the resources should implement similar systems at their expense, which allow all fire and police departments in the state to work together and communicate within a walled-garden that has no outside access to the Internet.
Argument's like Dempsey's, that the network, and not the governments, should change are tiresome because it would be so easy to get rid a lot of the common white collar crimes committed online by simply passing a few new laws. Make the banks totally responsible for validating the identity of the person applying for an account. Why is it legally possible for me to sign up for a credit card online, instead of having to go to a local bank, show two or three forms of ID, and send a notarized note of intent to open a credit card account? Just making that the legal requirement for opening a new line of credit would wipe out most identity theft in the United States within a few years. How about pass a law requiring online bankers to issue key fob security tokens to their customers, on the penalty of failing to do so results in the bank being civilly liable for loss of personal data?
You can reengineer the network until the heat death of the universe or the second coming all you want, but it won't change the fact that a significant chunk of the human race (between Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, Western Africa and China) live in functionally lawless environments when it comes to this sort of crime. The only way to "engineer" around that is to cut the backbone lines to those countries, connecting them to the first world countries.
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