Cyber Sherlocks need to tread softly softly

The heads of the National Crime Squad gathered in Birmingham earlier this week and wagged their collective fingers at ISPs for being slack at monitoring their servers for illegal material, and so breaking the law.

The comments came as part of the Home Office's recent £25m campaign to chase cyber criminals out of the virtual woodwork and convince us our law enforcers really are tech-savvy.

But the comments have upset the IT industry, which knows ISPs are more than willing to co-operate with the Old Bill.

The industry knows ISPs really shouldn't be responsible for material they unknowingly host. For one thing, it often gets on their servers through the free web space they offer subscribers. It would be impossible to examine millions of these pages without being tipped off.

But it seems the police are unaware of this simple maths.

Only a few weeks ago silicon.com reported on a policeman who demanded an ISP to reveal a subscriber's real world address and a list of all websites he or she may have visited based only on Hotmail account details. Another ISP had been asked to give address details of someone who was not even a subscriber.

In other words, instead of slamming those whose co-operation the detectives need most, the police should take a long and hard look at their own law enforcement tactics.

We were told both the above police actions could be potentially illegal under the RIP Act. So who is really breaking the law?

These over eager cyber Sherlocks need a code of practise and they need it now. They also need to learn how to practise good relations with the IT industry rather than blame it for their own shortcomings.