With difficulty. The internet craze and the effect it has had
on commerce and communication has made it very difficult to regulate, because no one planned for
its regulation ahead of time. That is, the cat was out of the bag and legislatures had to try
and react to problems that arose from computer use.
On the one hand,
computers offer a splendid record of activity. Pretty much everything you do, type or download
with a computer is recorded somewhere, and can usually be found on your own computer, and this
makes for fantastic evidence in a court of law to prove wrongdoing. This has helped to track
child pornography rings, but at the same time, the anonymous nature of the internet has caused
the crime rate in that area to explode.
But the internet knows few
borders, so the states have had to deal with how to assess taxes on transactions that happen
between residents of one state and those of another. They have had to rewrite some laws to
define fraud and other illegal activity as including computers and the internet as well, and of
course, identity theft is a huge problem for law enforcement because of its international
nature. States Attorney Generals have therefore had to concentrate some of their resources on
protecting state residents from international and interstate computer fraud and
theft.
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