Cyber Laws in Pakistan

Cyber Laws in Pakistan don’t have any exceptional history, as seen in the international trend, the cyber law making in Pakistan started mainly after 2001 i.e. Electronic Transaction Ordinance 2002. Furthermore a very pointing law, promulgated in 2007, i.e. Prevention of Electronic Crime Ordinance 2007 (PECO). I happened to study the PECO in reference to some cases. It looks good, complete and comprehensive and covering crime from every angle committed in a cyber environment. In start, I feel good about it but later on one thing keeps bothering me i.e. it did not provide a complete remedy for Intellectual Property rights infringement.
Later on, somehow I came to get a copy of Indian Information Technology Act 2000 . Things were very disappointing. I feel a very big and huge unfilled gap in the legislation of PECO, 2007. In fact I personally didn’t notice it unless or until I happened to get the Indian act for comparison. This unfilled gap was the awareness.  Awareness methods through which one can keep himself safe and secure. Here I am giving a comparison in a table form for the chapters of IT BILL 2000(India), ETO 2002(Pakistan) and PECO 2007(Pakistan).

In the above mentioned table, I tried to bring things in a very simple comparison. Nature and the basic architect of the different laws can be easily classified to make some conclusion. If we have a look on the IT bill 2000, which is implemented in India, we will notice that the designer has designed the Law with its basic emphasis on the awareness and introducing safety procedures. Whereas if we have a look to our laws structure, we do find punishments but no procedure to avoid those punishments or to avoid becoming a target or part of any such criminal activity which comes in the domain of cyber environment. Do we find any such thing in our laws?
I appreciate the steps our government has so far taken in establishing grounds for Laws related cyber environment in Pakistan. My request to the government is to change the nature and style of our legislation. May be we can adopt any more better and advanced model of cyber environment then other countries but not more disappointing.  

What Measures Should Government take? 
An incomplete and criminal nature of legislation supports the law enforcement agencies to misuse the loop holes left in the legislation. Our law should be focused on the procedures one can take to avoid any mishap. It is very unfortunate that in PECO, we don’t even find a single chapter related safety precautions. We don’t find anything dealing with the procedures for avoiding any cyber crime.
According to my point of view, in today’s world, computers are the weapons and therefore if we equip someone with this weapon, it’s the duty of government to also give them awareness of this weapon for its positive use. The government should initiate awareness campaign. The main interesting thing in this awareness campaign is that domain of this campaign is well defined i.e. computer literate or technology literate. What I suggest is that the government should introduce a compulsory subject in universities, from where most of our technology related public belongs. Contents of such subject should be covering the cyber environment, how to avoid being a target of cyber crimes or becoming part of such crimes.  Such Subject should be   from the Government to guide and to educate the computer literates about these cyber crimes. This will result in a network of information and automatically we will see the results of such awareness and control over cyber environment.