Technology-Based Crimes in Malaysia: Issues and Challenges for Investigation Officers in Gathering Computer Evidence

Technology advances faster than law and thus, the legislation must be broad enough in order to be able to embrace future technological development particularly in regard to the issues relating to gathering of evidence for trial. This paper discusses how the investigating officer (IO) gathers evidence from computers involving technology-based crimes committed both in the real world as well as the cyberspace, and whether it needs to be carried out within the scope of conventional legal framework of Evidence Act (EA) 1950, the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) and Penal Code per se or there are other legal regimes that specifically allocate the right provisions for those crimes. This is to ensure that specific crime be charged under specific Act accordingly. There is the Computer Crimes Act 1997 (CCA 1997), with its main focus on the function of the device. For a device to fall under the definition of a computer, it must be capable of performing the functions of a computer. Other Acts include the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 (CMA) and the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act 2002 (MACMA). With these Acts available, the key question addressed in this paper is, what are the real issues and challenges faced by IOs in gathering evidence especially for those crimes whose evidences are stored in computers, or cybercrimes for that matter. The paper concludes that for an IO to meet emergent issues and challenges, he needs to work within the scope of all those Acts to gather evidence in for any criminal prosecution involving computer/cybercrimes. In recent years, IO needs to understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) works in the context of criminal investigations.