Incommunicado

Just when I had managed to get a replacement for my laptop, which had conked out two months ago, I have to go through the distressful experience of losing two cellphones in as many months.

I haven't taken a bus from Philcoa to Ayala in quite some time -- if I need to go there, I usually take the MRT, which of course also harbors its share of pickpockets and snatchers -- and I had the lack of sense to ride one, exactly a week after typhoon Ondoy rendered thousands of people homeless. I had a slight fever and was thinking only about getting off the bus and buying medicine...to make a long story short, my wallet and cellphone was gone, quick as a blink, by the time I reached the pharmacy. This, less than two months after I had bought a cheap Nokia unit to replace the one I had stupidly left behind on some restaurant table.

This makes me wonder whether the incidence of theft (and other crimes against property) has risen along with the popularity and availability of communications gadgets. Before, hold-uppers and petty thieves had targetted cash and jewelry; today, the cellphone is of course the most sough-after loot, since almost everybody in Metro Manila has one. Add laptops and PDAs to the list of valuable items that robbers on the prowl could possibly score, and it's easy to understand why those dubious "secondhand" shops have proliferated in the back alleys of Manila.

Yet ICT does not only make the actual physical taking (with intent to gain, says the Revised Penal Code) of tangible property more common and easier to commit; valuable data, or access to such data, could also be stolen and much profit could be had from these ephemeral bits of information. I know people who have lost their ATM cards and had cash withdrawn from their accounts, even if they've never disclosed their PINs to anyone else. A gamer friend even insists that online theft of rare artifacts, skills or score points in RPGs should be criminalized.

And therein lies the rub. The proliferation of ICT has given rise to a new standard of material value -- and hence, whole new ways of committing crime. With next year's automated elections triggering massive concern about data security, the need to develop a legal framework to address cybercrime has become even more urgent. In a country that has seen the Garci scandal, the Hayden Kho videos, and the Human Security Act, it's about time that our laws caught up with the challenges posed by technology and its transformative effects -- the good, the bad, and the simply preposterous -- on human lives.