Letter: Hacked off

The report (2 August) on the arrest of a computer hacker in Shetland raises a couple of issues.

Firstly, why were officers from what is technically a foreign police service involved? Should the arrest not have been carried out by officers of Highland Constabulary, the local force?

Does Metropolitan Police jurisdiction now extend to the far north of Scotland? Perhaps justice secretary Kenny MacAskill might like to tell the public when the Met was given powers of arrest in Shetland (surely itshould be spending time arresting its own officers involved in another type of hacking)? It may have a specialist computer unit but we cannot have foreign police tramping over Scotland.

The second point is that this is a new crime and as usual the authorities are well behind the curve.

We have the lone teenager sitting in his bedroom in a remote part of the country allegedly accessing and overcoming the online security of major organisations. The reaction is to bring the full force of the law down on him but it would be better to rehabilitate these craftsmen by using their skills to upgrade the very organisations which are so behind in their security.

It used to be said in the early days of computing that there were two types of user: those who had lost data and those who were going to lose data.

Now it appears there are two types of user: those who have been hacked and those who are going to be hacked.

Bruce D Skivington

Strath

Gairloch, Wester Ross