LRC Proposes New Offences To Tackle Cybercrime

The Law Reform Commission (LRC) on Wednesday proposed introducing new offences to better tackle hacking or other cybercrime.

It said at the moment, Hong Kong does not have an ordinance that specifically deals with cybercrime, and different offences are covered in various pieces of legislation – some of which are outdated.

For example, the commission said the offence of obtaining access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent cannot apply to somebody who uses his or her own computer to set up a phishing website.

"We felt that it's time to update our whole cybercrime approach, to be consistent with other jurisdictions to put it into a specific set of ordinance to cover five categories of cybercrime," said senior counsel Derek Chan, a member of the commission's cybercrime sub-committee.

After studying the practices and laws in seven jurisdictions, the LRC proposes five new offences, namely illegal access to a programme or data, illegal interference of a computer system, illegal interception and interference of computer data as well as possessing a device or data for committing a crime.

Chan said they have recommended a generic defence based on reasonable excuse for unauthorised access and they would like to know if exemptions should be given to unauthorised access for cybersecurity purposes.

"We haven't recommended specifically that any unauthorised access for the public interest necessarily amounts to reasonable excuse. The whole point of using reasonable excuse is to let the court has some flexibility and the defendants have some flexibility arguing what may be reasonable or may not be reasonable by reference to our own societal standards," he said.

Offenders of the proposed offences could be jailed for up to 14 years, and could get life imprisonment if their acts involve endangering people's lives.

The LRC also proposed that Hong Kong courts should have jurisdiction over cybercrime committed overseas if the criminals or victims are Hongkongers, the target computer or data is in Hong Kong, or if the criminal act caused serious damage to the territory.

Members of the public have until October 19 to submit their views.