“Internet Security Law” to be Proposed
at the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party
On August 29, 2007, during the Computer Malware Management and Law Seminar held in Shanghai, the government agencies involved with Internet security jointly proposed an "Internet Security Law" to be presented at the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (NCCCP). [1]
Officials from eight government agencies including the Ministry of the Information Industry, the Ministry of Public Security, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Information under the State Council, and delegates from over 20 Internet institutes or corporations attended the seminar.
Lei Jun, the CEO of Kingsoft, a software company located in Beijing, representing the software industry, said that Kingsoft and other software companies all strongly criticize the malware programmers and have tried to improve the technology for detecting and removing malware. The software companies that develop antivirus software felt that government laws do not provide them with enough support. This is one of main reasons that the Trojan Horses became rampant.
Since the need for an "Internet Security Law" is important to the software industry, the government agencies at the seminar decided to jointly propose the "Internet Security Law" at the 17th NCCCP and to monitor and speed up its enactment.
Earlier this year, at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 10th Chinese National People＇s Congress held in March, Representative Zhang Xuedong proposed eight new laws or amendments, and one of them was the "Internet Security Law." [2]
Zhang presented stunning Internet crime statistics: in 2005, the rate of virus infection on computer systems in the country was 80%; there were 72.8 thousand new viruses; the rate of consumers attacked by spyware dramatically increased from 30% to 90%. In 2005, over 9100 websites filed Internet tampering cases and among them, 2027 were government websites. In January 2006, there were 391 cases of tampering of government websites.
Zhang also pointed out that only a few of the filed cases were investigated. The current computer laws are too broad and were not able to guide the crackdown on Internet crimes. Zhang suggested that the new law should punish "Internet crimes" as well rather than only focusing on "computer crimes." At the same time, the current "crime of illegal invasion of computer systems" only includes tampering with computer systems belonging to the government, the defense industry and high-tech research. Instead, it should cover all economic entities, public information services and all the legal consumers on the Internet.
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