Yahoo: We need effective cybercrime laws

Yahoo has called for "effective" legislation, combined with industry self-regulation, to deal with online fraud, child abuse and other cybercrime.

The Internet services giant appealed on Thursday for policymakers to concentrate on defining illegal use of technology, rather than focus on how an action breaks the law.

"Effective policy defines what is legal and what is illegal. If legislation is concerned with how an action is illegal, it creates rigidity, and means the legislation won't keep up with the technology," Robin Pembrooke, the director of product operations for Yahoo Europe, told ZDNet UK.

The lack of global legislation adds to the complexity of the situation, Pembroke added. "It's not realistic to have global legislation, but we do need international consistency," he said. "One example is 'child abuse' content, which has a different definition in the U.S. than in the U.K."

Pembrooke advocated a combination of legislation and self-regulation of Internet businesses in order to combat cybercrime.

"There are some really good examples of where the industry has come together. The Internet Watch Foundation is funded by industry, and without legislation, this approach has achieved fantastic things in the last five years," Pembrooke said.

Worldwide cooperation
An Interpol officer agreed with Pembroke's remarks, and called for a global legislative structure to make international evidence transfer easier, and international response times quicker.

"(Pembrooke) is completely right, we shouldn't overlegislate," said Bernhard Otupal, a crime intelligence officer at the Financial and High Tech Crime Sub-Directorate of Interpol. "In the EU, there are so many different regulations covering different technologies. What we need is real international legislation and a global legislative framework."

"There must be a self-regulatory process for the big players, with internal rules, as that is efficient. However, self-regulation is not enough--you need both legislation and self regulation," Otupal said.

Yahoo said that over-legislation is incompatible with the needs of its customers, which needed to be balanced with the needs of governments.

"We find users want freedom of expression, privacy and ease of use. We have to balance that with the needs of governments looking for increasing access to data," Pembrooke said.

Last year, Yahoo was accused of passing data to the Chinese government that led to the arrest and imprisonment of two Chinese Internet users, including a journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Saying Yahoo felt "horrible" about the political arrests of Internet users in China, Pembroke underlined that the Web company believes it's better to be there and cooperate with the authorities than not be there.

"By cooperating with the authorities, we can improve people's lives. By giving them access to the Internet, this raises awareness in differences in government approaches, and increase forces for change," he said.

"Our challenge is we have to work inside the laws of the countries we operate in," Pembrooke said.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[n3td3v]

Yahoo want to lock up n3td3v?

Hahaha, i've heard it all now. Yahoo security team are sitting in Sunnyvale trying to work out a way to stop n3td3v and can't because of the lame U-S laws.

[n3td3v]

Yet again....

The industry uses the "CHILD ABUSE" coin to drum up public support to get hackers and cyber terrorists locked up. Great.

[n3td3v]

This reminds me of the Google case

"We want your search data because of CHILD ABUSE" crap to win over public support. LOL, the public seen through your attempts on that, like they will see through your attempts here also.

[n3td3v]

Yahoo execs

Are they blogging yet? We know blogging is the single most easy way for a corporate user to get hacked. Set up a sinner at their blog login, capture the user/pass, ip. The IP relates to home PCs, corporate PCs, wireless devices, and then are hacked. Great little trend the blog thing is.

[n3td3v]

Yahoo 360

We warned Yahoo security team over a year ago of the danger of laucning Yahoo 360. The service that had all its employees registered on it during beta testing, and then went public with all those employee names registered on it. Within hours of the service going live, internetional hackers had built up the biggest employee database ever, and then hacked all of them. However I warned Yahoo security team before hand not to launch the service to the public until they had deleted all the employee accounts, but they didn't listen to me, so now Yahoo live in a world where they encourge employees to blog around the world and get hacked.

[rallynochaos]

Yahoo pressing legislatures? Joke.

Why is Yahoo pressing this all of a sudden? This article busts out saying Yahoo is trying to get international laws set up and is trying to work with Interpol but doesn't give one good reason why. As n3td3v or whatever his name said in one of his million pointless comments, theyre playing the "Child Abuse" card. Yet did the article mention a single reason why Yahoo is getting so worked up? There isnt any suprising statistics mentioned in the article.