Government is seeking to replace the Computer Misuse Act (2005) with new legislation aimed at fighting cybercrime.Making the announcement during Monday’s opening session of a Workshop on Effective Legal Frameworks for Building the Digital Economy, Attorney General Dale Marshall outlined that a draft has already been prepared by the Law Reform Commission and should be on its way to Parliament in two months.He noted that the current Act did not cast a wide enough net to address the current day issues facing the digital economy.“The Computer Misuse Act has as its focus how people misuse the technology, but it didn’t get into the specifics and the nitty gritty. It was a very general statute at the time, but as time moved along, we recognised how poor it was as a statute to govern criminal behavior.“Our new statute when passed, will provide specifically for the combatting of cybercrime in all of its iterations - from illegal access to computer systems to computer-related fraud to child pornography to child grooming to cyber bullying and all of these things we tried to contort ourselves to see if we can fit it into something now called computer misuse,” he stated.Marshall stressed, “We cannot look to develop the digital economy across the region in any serious way without looking at cybercrime.”
