Mr. Paul C. Dwyer:

I am happy to add to that. As Mr. Larkin says, in theory one can trace back if somebody has tweeted something. The Non-Fatal Offences against the Person Act is pretty good legislation to use if somebody is cyberstalking or hassling another person. I could use that to try to get a prosecution, or the Garda could use it to take a case. The problem is that subjectivity comes into it. When someone goes to the Garda Síochána and says that somebody has put up a voting poll for voting their child the tallest or smallest in the class, is that a crime or an opinion? It is subjective because the Garda does not know where to turn next. Does it bring a case to the DPP? There is a vacuum there and we need to fill it by giving some sort of guidance to gardaí on when it is a crime or an opinion. We must remember that law enforcement comes back to making a complaint which is then investigated to see if a crime has been committed. It follows that path.

One can use the law to deal with that but it is very expensive for organisations to turn that material around. The majority of fraud departments in telecommunications providers are now working on providing lawful interception requests for the Garda because it does not have the resources at its disposal. What crime is not cyber-related these days? What crime does not involve a mobile telephone or the Internet? Every crime has a cyber element but the Garda is completely under-resourced to deal with that issue at the moment. That is a separate area, however.

The term cyberscum covers cyberstalkers. We get a lot of issues around ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends whose material is being put up online, thus making other adults' lives a misery. We see criminal gangs who are sexually outing other people to blackmail them into providing information to help them facilitate a crime.

We have a huge element of bullying with cyber predators shoulder to shoulder in the same environment. If one finds cyber bullies, one will also find cyber predators by which I mean paedophiles. They are people who exchange indecent imagery of children within those network groups. They are working with vulnerable children. They will find a vulnerable child and groom them, which is a seduction technique. They may say, "I see you are being bullied, so I will be your friend online". Before one knows it, they are getting images off that child. That is the nasty bit, but it is how it works. That is the murky, sinister world of cyber scum.