ABC gets its cyber crime all mixed up

Sam Varghese
Friday, 22 October 2010 15:28

Opinion and Analysis

It's rarely that Australia's main public broadcaster, the ABC, dips its feet into the technology arena. And when it does, it often ends up as it did last night, with much hype and little substance.

For some strange reason, one of the segments on the 7.30 Report, the flagship current affairs programme, was titled "Cyber Crime on the rise." Maybe it was a slow news day.

The premise of the segment? "Over the past five years according to the Reserve Bank, the use of cheques has fallen to just three per cent of non-cash payments, while electronic payments have risen 35 per cent, averaging 200 transactions for every Australian and so creating a haven for cyber crime."

The introduction, from the business editor of the programme, Greg Hoy, was even more dramatic: "It is the crime of the century: ecrime, electronic theft, daylight robbery."

But to justify this, some startling statistics had to be provided. Only one of the four big Australian banks was willing to talk; the Commonwealth Bank did not feed into this theory of the "haven", pointing out that as far as its losses went it "would be fractions of cents per $1000 transacted."

This was mentioned quite late in in the segment, with Hoy's language along the way trying to substitute for the fact that the whole report really seemed to be all about a rather minor phenomenon.

"It's big enough to make the most audacious armed robbery seem positively prehistoric," was another of his classic lines.