http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2845353a6022,00.html 15 March 2004 By RICHARD WOOD Police have laid the first charges for hacking under the controversial Crimes Amendment (No 6) Act, which was passed in mid-2003 and carries severe penalties for computer crime. Electronic crime lab national manager Martin Kleintjes says the charges relate to alleged damage caused to a website and the computer systems of a company in Maryland in the United States. He declines to name the firm. The accused man appeared in Dunedin District Court on Thursday morning and was granted name suppression. He entered no plea and was remanded on bail till March 18. Mr Kleintjes says all the charges laid are under the Crimes Amendment (No 6) Act. One charge is for damaging or interfering with a computer system, albeit not in a way that would endanger life - an offence which carries a maximum seven-year jail term. Another charge is for accessing a computer system without authorisation, which can result in imprisonment for up to two years. New Zealand police were alerted to the alleged crime by counterparts in the United States through a network of e-crime fighters that is made up of representatives from the G8 group of countries. Mr Kleintjes says it has been a complex case but the e-crime unit has received very good co-operation internationally. The Crimes Amendment (No 6) Act created specific computer-related offences and took four years to make it through parliament. Before the act was passed hackers could be charged only under general legislation, such as that which deals with theft and criminal damage. The Green Party and some commentators spoke out against the anti-hacking legislation, arguing there was no need for a specific anti-hacking law, that people should need to show malicious intent in order to commit a crime, and that the potential penalties were too harsh. Cross-border prosecutions for hacking remain relatively rare. Last month a British teenager was sentenced to 200 hours community service for hacking into the computer system of a US physics research laboratory which carried out research into subatomic particles and nuclear weapons in order to store his collection of music and film files on the laboratory's computers. Electronic Crime Lab staffer Simon Welborn recently told a seminar in Wellington that the unit was getting a growing number of requests for support from its counterparts overseas to help track down New Zealanders involved in cross-border crimes relating to e-commerce. The unit isn't paid for such work by overseas agencies and has flagged its resources are being stretched by a growing workload. Most of the work of the Police's Electronic Crime Lab concerns "traditional" rather than electronic crime, and includes gathering evidence held on hard disks and stored in e-mails. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo@private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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