FIA’s cybercrime wing ‘in dire straits’

ISLAMABAD: Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications has asked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to increase the capacity of trained staff to cope up with the new challenges of cybercrime.

The committee on Thursday was briefed on current status of the state agency’s cybercrime department.

FIA’s Cybercrime Wing Director Muhammad Shoaib said “Currently there are 114 officials in the cybercrime wing of the agency in different offices of the country out of which only ten are investigators and the staff lacks training to cope up with emerging challenges of the cyber space.”

Shoaib went on to say that the much-hyped cybercrime wing of the watchdog is in dire straits with ten investigators to look into heavy influx of complaints including lack of professional and technical capacity to handle cases of different nature.

To this, the Chairperson of the committee Senator Rubina Khalid asked him if there were any proper training from abroad about the latest challenges to cope with the cybercrimes in the contemporary world.

“It is unfortunate that we lack such staff and professional capacity to handle the influx of complaints,” he lamented, adding there are hardly any female staffers in the team.

About 25 per cent of the complaints are women oriented so the wing needs more women to look into cases related to them, he added.

However, Khalid argued that “it meant that time and resources were being wasted on such important matter while the wing had no capacity or facilities at the time when elections are in the offing and harassment of women needed to be addressed.”

The FIA official continued with the agency’s woes and said they were working in challenging conditions as rules for the proper functioning of the cyber wing have yet to be approved since the passage of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in 2016.

“We will request the committee to pass these rules so that we start functioning properly,” he said while sharing the copy of the rules with the chairperson.

He added that after the passage of rules system would start smoothly as they had specified job description of the officials to be appointed against different positions.

Sharing the history of the wing, he said it was established in 2007 as a project of the FIA with 46 working staff. And currently 114 staffers were working but the non-approval of rules had hamstrung the functioning of the wing, he stressed.

He stated that since the passage of the bill about 18,319 complaints had been received in which 2,655 complainants want to pursue the cases.

When asked about the way about going after the accused, the director cyber wing replied that they had to file a case against such person in the court and take that order to the Facebook for action against that person.

Contrary to this the members criticised the patch-up option between the victim and accused to which the official said it was in the bill passed by parliament.

To which chairperson of the committee curtly replied that they had to pass the bill for some reasons but it was passed as sent to them. “We passed what was sent by the ministry,” she stated.

Senator Rukhsana Zuberi stated that it needed to be changed while the chairperson added that the person found guilty of wrongdoing must be punished.

The FIA official stated that for the third phase of development of cybercrime project Rs1.1 billion have been approved in the new budget in which 416 new persons would be recruited with 25% women staff.

The committee also recommended taking action against a man posing for video in Kailash, Chitral and harassing women of the valley. “The FIA should take action against the harasser and submit the report with the committee in the next meeting,” she concluded.

Source: Express Tribune