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alexk
Guest
American Chamber (AMCHAM) CEO Nirad Tewarie yesterday told the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the Cybercrime Bill that fines must be “sufficient to deter cybercrime” and has proposed penalties in the region of between $300,000 and $500,000.
Appearing before the JSC yesterday, Tewarie said the lowest fine under the proposed legislation is now $100,000 but said that is “very low” given the “transnational nature of cybercrime.”
Tewarie said AMCHAM viewed the bill as “absolutely necessary because of its reach and the ubiquity of electronic communication and the utilisation of hardware and software.” He said the chamber was “mindful” of the need to balance privacy rights and “also to ensure that the public interest is never undermined through the passage of legislation such as this.”
Responding to questions from committee chair, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi, the former journalist and secretary of the Media Association of T&T said AMCHAM is also not recommending any mandatory standards be imposed on the media. He said media houses which are part of the Media Complaints Council, “which I think needs revitalisation, do have internal standards and procedures for reviewing, upholding those standards where issues may arise.”
He said AMCHAM had not discussed it, but giving his personal opinion and “given my varied experience in public life, I think that any code for the media, given the historical and changing role of the media, must be voluntary and the limits of which are prescribed by the boundaries of the truth in libel and defamation laws.”
Al-Rawi said media houses have been subject to self-regulation and sought Tewarie’s view on the citizen journalist. Tewarie said he inferred from the question that the AG was asking about “restriction and boundaries.”
He said AMCHAM did not believe that “journalism is a profession which should be licensed in any way. But we do believe that journalists or people aspiring to be journalists,” as he made the distinction between a citizen’s report, “who passes on information,” and the journalist, “who seeks to verify it and add context, and so on should be limited by the truth, and the truth is the defence of a journalist.”
Al-Rawi assured that “just for the record, we don’t propose any form of regulatory management of any form of journalism.”