When you get old and buzzardly, spend a lot of time on social media and identify as male and single, you get all these incongruent friend requests from improbable online personas.
Not just porn, sextortion and pedophilia — Martinelli
was extradited under the Cyber-Crimes Convention
by Eric Jackson
The National Assembly has turned its attention to computer crimes. Not especially the ones we have seen from and within Panama’s political caste – the massive theft of confidential government records for partisan / personalist campaign purposes; the viral spread of scurrilous montages alleging things about the sexuality of political adversaries;; hacking that shuts down, even erases, critical websites; all manner of interception of supposedly private communications. (The Cyber-Crimes Convention specifically provides that the extradition principle of specialty does not apply, no matter what the fugitive sticky fingers and money launderer holed up in the Nicaraguan Consulate may claim.)
Having passed out of committee, the full legislature is now considering proposed Bill 61, which criminalizes a lot of sleazy online practices, with most of the discussion revolving around extortion, the sexual recruitment of minors by adults and pornography. For some crimes under the proposed law, a person could be sentenced to 20 years in Panama’s hellish prison system.
The international players on the scene – Israeli and Italian hacking companies, skullduggery arising from the US and Chinese rivalry playing out on the isthmus, West African criminal organizations, thuggish multinational corporations deep-sixing their data via Panama – those are not much addressed here.
It is not, however, as if what’s left isn’t real. Ricardo Beteta Bond, more or less the founder of Panama’s gay liberation movement, puts it this way:
Cases of scams, extortion, theft and even assault are common. The ease with which one can create a profile and contact others, together with the promise of anonymous encounters, has been used by malicious individuals to perpetrate criminal acts.
So would President Mulino sign it? Would someone in the legislature or the rabiblanco media dare to bring up the history of cyber-crime in our political history? We shall see.
In Spanish, read the proposed law — ACTUALLY, YOU CAN’T BECAUSE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY NOW BURIES INFORMATION ABOUT BILLS IT IS CONSIDERING, WHICH USED TO BE EASILY AVAILABLE ON ITS WEBSITE.
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