Policing cyberspace

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Defenders of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, including Malacañang, have fallen to the trite and tired discourse about freedom and responsibility: how this law supposedly upholds the ideal of keeping people responsible while exercising their freedoms.

They are missing the point.

While freedom and responsibility are valid arguments to having a law that will defend everyone’s rights while everyone enjoys freedoms, the main beef about the anti-cybercrime law is this: how is it going to be implemented? Can our justice system in fact, given its resources and realities, enforce it?

With half of our judges like you and I, who are not too familiar with cyberspace media, how are they going to judge these cases? Right off, I can cite a few sticky situations that our judges can get themselves in with this new law. How do you regard the phenomenon of “Liking” in Facebook? Does that mean one agrees with the post in question, or does that mean one simply “likes” the fact that I was posted. Now, if the post happens to be libelous, does liking it make one equally guilty?

As it is, we cannot even truly make out what “like” is in FB: people click like even on posts that someone in the family died, that someone got into trouble, that somebody had some kitchen disaster. Bring in the cybercrime law, and how, pray tell, will we decide what “like” means?

The same can be said of “Share” and “Tag.” What does it really mean when we hit the “share” and “tag” button? Does that mean simply sharing an idea, like maybe informing someone this post concerning him or her is circulating on the Net, or does that mean we agree with it wholeheartedly and, therefore, is now an accessory to the crime. And then again the question: does agreeing to a libelous idea already make one as guilty as the one who thought of it and started spreading it?

Retweeting, or helping spread one micro-message on Twitter, raises the same questions in the context of the cybercrime law. Adding to the complication is the fact that in cyberspace, things can be easily manipulated: pictures can be enhanced, and even erased, words can be added or subtracted, why, we are even starting to distort reality here! And anyone, it seems, can do these already, except me and my generation and those older, who continue to struggle with the overwhelming knowledge that has suddenly become available at the touch of our fingertips.

How will the poor judge, who may not even have an FB account cope with these questions? I am raising the questions because I myself, computer user and Net trawler that I already am, do not even have the answers to them. If I am typical of the Net user of my generation, then I have no high hopes most of our judges and prosecutors would be as tech-savvy as knowing how to upload photos in cyberspace because I don’t.

Yes, there is a need to ensure we are protected against the criminal minds and hands that lurk in the Net. You and I know that some of the most acerbic and acidic writings can be found on cyberspace – especially on those message boards and free-flowing discussions on blogs.

But the first thing we need to realize before we make measures to do so would be the fact that cyberspace is a new phenomenon and the old tools that we have, like laws and human rights principles, may not be the right things to use there. I honestly do not know what those tools could be, but as we are finding out now with the reactions to the CPA of 2012, we need to keep the discussions going.

I have a crazy idea: how about a new level of tolerance, perhaps a redefinition of what’s libelous and what’s not? Just as cyberspace has redefined the media and given us thoroughly new forms of media, it might require us now to reexamine what is criminal there and what’s not.*

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