Transnational Crimes And Information Technologies

Transnational crimes have become rampant in the wake of globalization and technological advancement. The crimes are generally carried out by organized crime groups and individuals, who are highly sophisticated, well coordinated and technologically conscious. The groups themselves are so amorphous and cannot be easily identified. Present, emerging and future development in the information and communication technology is an essential tool in detecting, investigating, deterring and preventing these crimes. Significant steps have been made in this regard, and tracking and identifying criminals has become much easier that it was a decade ago. However, ethical and legal suitability of a number of these techniques have been raised, mainly revolving around rights to privacy and likelihood of abuse. Secondly, the transnational crimes too take advantage of the very technology to coordinate and evade justice. Thirdly, there has been lots of politicization of ICT policy counter-measures; stakeholders have argued that anti-privacy measures like consolidating a common bio-data base are imposition of American interest on global fraternity. As ICT progresses, there is a need to intensify regional participation in combating transnational crimes and to make compromise on some of the legal and ethical issues that hinder effective use of technology to combat the crimes.