Although the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had returned from his trip to the United States and Japan to sell the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) and the government’s proposal to provide the world’s best soft infrastructure of supporting laws, policies and practices, including the proposed new cyber legislation to be passed by Parliament when it reconvenes in March, there is still no news about making public the four cyberbills which had been approved by Cabinet.
These cyberbills, on digital signature, multimedia copyright, computer crimes and telemedicine development should be made public without any delay so that Malaysia would not acquire international attention as a country which legislates cyberlaws without any extensive public discussion or feedback - which is a practice completely at variance with the culture of an Information Age.
In other countries, proposed cyberlaws have received extensive public comment and feedbacks. In the United States, for instance, there are public hearings into the government’s proposals on multimedia copyright as well as thousands of pages of written comments, whether filed in paper form or through the Internet, by hundreds of individuals and companies.
In his recent visit to Los Angeles, the Prime Minister has shown that the government realises the importance of enlisting the support of Silicon Valley if MSC is to be made a success. This is understandable. For instance, the Silicon Valley Software Industry Coalition, which consists of several of the software and electronic commerce industry’s leading edge companies, represents members who have over 240,000 employees and world-wide revenues of over US$60 billion. In contrast, the annual revenue of the Federal Government of Malaysia is only in the region of RM60 billion.
This does not mean, however, that the MSC could be a success without the full support of Malaysians, and this is why the proposed cyberlaws should be made public to get the fullest feedback in the country before they are presented to Parliament in March.
The Bar Council’s offer yesterday to give its assistance in the development and formulation of the new cyberlaws, as well as in assisting in the setting up of a new Cyber-Court of Justice, is most welcome and should be accepted by the Government to open a new chapter of government-Bar Council co-operation on legislative matters.
The Bar has a rich reservoir of legal expertise in areas connected with cyberlaws which are not present in the Attorney-General’s Chambers as some of the Bar members had been specialising in advising IT companies in these fields, and these legal resources in the private bar should be tapped in the formulation of Malaysian cyberlaws.
The legal practitioners in America had been actively involved in the formulation of cyberlaws and there is no reason why this good practice should not be followed in Malaysia.
In Utah, which is the first legal system in the world to adopt a comprehensive statute enabling electronic commerce through digital signatures, the Digital Signature Act was adopted on February 27, 1995 and took effect on May 1, 1995. It was amended in February 1996.
Both the original 1995 Utah Act and the 1996 amendments were drafted by an ad hoc Digital Signature Legislative Facilitation Committee comprising volunteers representing public and private-sector organisations involved in Utah business, as well as getting inputs from the Information Security Committee of the American Bar Association’s Science and Technology Section.
Cyberlaws are a completely new territory and this is why there should not only be the fullest public discussion and feedback before Malaysia adopts any cyber legislation - for it must meet not only the needs of the country but the Internet community, the Bar Council should be actively involved in the formulation of the cyberlaws.
(23/1/97)