[ISN] As Hacking Hits Home, China Strengthens Cyber Laws

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/164712/as_hacking_hits_home_china_strengthens_cyber_laws.html

By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service
May 11, 2009

A year ago, when a Time Magazine reporter told Tan Dailin that he'd been 
identified as someone who may have hacked the Pentagon, he gasped and 
asked, "Will the FBI send special agents out to arrest me?"

The answer, it turns out, was, "No, the Chinese government will."

Dailin, better known in Chinese hacker circles as Withered Rose, was 
reportedly picked up last month in Chengdu, China, by local authorities. 
He is now facing seven years in prison under a new Chinese cybercrime 
law that was passed in late February.

Although the Western media has been awash with stories of Chinese 
hacking for years, cybercrime was until recently governed by three 
articles added to China's criminal code in 1997. The laws were 
out-of-date and "failed to correlate proportionately with the tremendous 
social harm" caused by cybercrime, according to a recent paper on 
Chinese cyber-law published in the International Journal of Electronic 
Security and Digital Forensics.

"China has made significant progress in cybercrime legislation and is 
putting in great efforts to strengthen it," said Man Qi, one of the 
paper's co-authors, in an e-mail interview.

[...]


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