Dear GKD Colleagues, I work for a NGO that is fighting trafficking in women and girls in India and Bangladesh. I think the idea of law enforcement agencies collaborating to fight cyber-terrorism is a good one, and that NGOs should cooperate and share information with government. But there are two problems that we face in the field that noone has mentioned. One is a problem of corruption in the lower levels of police and government. The work we do is very dangerous and we are constantly threatened by the scoundrels and criminals who are making huge sums of money by trafficking women and girls. We have to protect information about our organization, our activities, our local staff, and the women and girls who are being trafficked. The government and police at the national level might be completely honest. But in some places the local authorities and police have been paid by the traffickers themselves. No matter what agreements are made to reduce suspicion of the police by the NGOs at the top level, it will not affect us here far away from the capital. I also think that most of the cyber-terrorism that we have been discussing is carried out by people who are in the field, not in the capital.
Please do not think we are stubborn in refusing to share information with the police. We are not the only ones who fear corrupt officials. I went to a meeting on trafficking that brought together NGOs from around the world and met someone from the IOM (International Organisation for Migration) which is doing a lot of work on collecting data about trafficking and she was telling me that they have the same problem. They have a huge amount of information and there is a lot of pressure on them to share the information with governments. But they are afraid that some corrupt officials will pass that information on to traffickers. The result could be actual death of some people fighting traffickers. So in this kind of case, cyber-security means protecting the information from the police! So if we are going to talk in this discussion about working together to fight against cyber-security and cyber-terrorism, we have to find a solution to this problem of local corruption. I can not quite imagine how this could be done at a local level because it is such as huge problem. But unless you find a solution, we in NGOs will not be willing to work with the local police and share our information, which is often better than theirs. The other problem is that traffickers are using the internet to trap women and girls in their net. This is not a big problem for us in India and Bangladesh because women do not have a lot of ways to reach the internet. But the anti-trafficking NGOs in East Europe told us that it is a bigger problem for them because women have more chances to have an email account. The women are promised good jobs and then when they meet the person who has sent the email they are kidnapped and sold into slavery. Some way should be designed to track down these traffickers through their email. Sudha ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
