How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge. The immediacy of electronic communications networks allowed the Love Bug to spread around the globe in just hours on Thursday, knocking out tens of millions of computers in homes, businesses, military installations and government agencies. Shapiro said instant electronic communications had called into question what an occurrence was and where it took place.
National laws differ.
But James Dempsey, senior staff counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet civil liberties advocacy group, said that in most cases, existing laws were adequate to cope with the new attacks. Dempsey noted that computer users often left the equivalent of fingerprints in their travels over the Web and that the digital revolution had in many ways been a boon to law enforcement, making these crimes easier to track than traditional ones. Chances are that criminal activities online are already criminal. He said many computer crimes were covered by statutes on money laundering, intellectual property theft, child pornography and other offenses. ZD Inc. ZDNet Logo is a service mark of ZD Inc.