The office of Attorney General has received a draft Computer Crime and Cybercrime Bill which now awaits formal legislation in Parliament.
The Act provides for a legal framework for the criminalization of computer and network related offences.
The law aims at criminalizing certain illegal content in line with regional and international best practices, provide specific procedural instruments for the investigation of such offences and define the liability of service providers.
Threatened by increasing global cyber crime activities the governmenent has finalized drafts of three bills to curb the global communication threat.
The Minister for Communication, Science and Technology, Prof. Makame Mbarawa told Parliament yesterday that draft bills for the Cyber Security Laws, the Personal Data Protection and the Computer and Cyber were ready.
Presenting the ministerial budget estimates for 2014/2015, the minister added that in addition to the envisaged law, the government through the Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) had since put measures to curb cyber crime across the country.
Prof. Mbarawa requested Parliament to approve Sh67,221,001,000 for the 2014/2015 ministerial budget.
He said under a programme that started in 2012 saw the creation of a Computer Emergency Response Team which is responsible for checking computer communications in the country.
The minister said the communications sector was growing fast, so there was need to have strong legal mechanisms to govern it.
“The government has created a good environment that allows this sector to grow tremendously,” he said.
His budget speech shows that the number of mobile phone users grew from 2.96 million in 2005 to 27.45 million last December.
The number of internet users has also increased from 3.56 million in 2008 to 9.3 million in December, 2013. Other services on mobile phone like money transfer also has increased. The service has 12, 330,962 users.
From July, 2013 to April, 2014 some 972,641,605 transactions worth Sh28.3 trillion were made. The minister told the House that the service has reduced congestion and time spent at different places for such services like banks, among others.
The House Committee on Infrastructure also urged the government through TCRA to ensure adequate control of the sector.
Tabling its findings, deputy chairperson Prof Juma Kapuya said the regulatory authority should ensure safety of the public against cyber crime.
The task force will comprise members from the Bank of Tanzania (BoT), Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Tanzania Bankers Association (TBA) and the Police Force Cyber Crime Unit.
The team will work on causes of fraud in electronic financial services and propose measures to curb the problem. They will also propose a framework for combating fraud and cyber-crimes in delivery of financial services in Tanzania.
The task force is the first of its kind to bring state and private business leaders together to address cybercrime.
But the minister explained that since the introduction of Telecommunication Traffic Monitoring System (TTMS) the government though TCRA has realized a lot of benefits and how to tame cybercrime.
By January 2014 the system brought in Sh6.8bn to the government coffers, and there are machines that record all the incoming international calls to Tanzania and trace fraud in calls coming in the country.
The minister said fraud has been reduced from 60 percent before the machinery, to below two percent currently. There are plans to use the same system to monitor interconnection and phone money transactions
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