The Home Secretary announced yesterday that up to 80 dedicated "cybercops" will be deployed both nationally and locally to fight “the growing menace of crime on the internet.”
The cash injection follows endorsements by the Prime Minister to improve the technical capability of law enforcement to investigate internet crime and establish the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which will begin work in April 2001. It also follows industry criticism that the Home Secretary’s budget of £337,000 announced in January to set up a National Computer Crime Unit was inadequate.
The government says the measures will place the UK “at the forefront of the international fight against cybercrime” and, in line with the UK’s G8 commitments, “help fund a 24-hour international hot-line to trade information on potential attacks on the national infrastructure and promote closer cross-border working.”
The Home Secretary Jack Straw added:
"The Government is committed to action against hi-tech crime in line with our objective of making the UK the best and safest place in the world to conduct and engage in e-commerce.
"Modern technologies such as the internet offer up huge legitimate benefits, but also powerful opportunities for criminals, from those involved in financial fraud to the unlawful activities of paedophiles. The significant cash injection I am announcing today will boost the police service's capability to investigate crime committed through computers, including paedophilia, fraud, extortion and hacking.”
The £25m cash boost will fund up to 40 dedicated investigators based at the multi-agency National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and up to 46 officers in local forces. Nationally, the unit will investigate attacks on the Critical National Infrastructure; major internet based offences of paedophilia, fraud or extortion; information from seized electronic media; and gather intelligence on cybercrime and cybercriminals.
This will be supported by work in local forces to investigate crimes committed on computers, help with requests for information from overseas and provide intelligence.
The Council of Europe has said that it plans to issue a re-draft of its proposed international cybercrime treaty later this week. The move follows criticism from internet pressure groups that the initial draft represented a threat to basic human rights. According to Reuters, the Council’s re-draft will address critics’ “serious misunderstandings” of certain passages in the original version.
The treaty aims to harmonise national laws against hacking, fraud, viruses, child pornography and other internet crimes.
