Until recently, anyone who interacted with the ICT world in their everyday life, they were at the mercy of any cyber mischief. Legislation was hazy or non-existent, especially regarding cyber-attacks and propagation of malware and viruses.

If this law is applied to the letter, many will fall victims. To begin with, cyber-stalking, that annoying habit of harassing people on either their timelines or email in order to trigger anxiety and general discomfort among their helpless target, had better brace for some bad news.

The same goes for spamming, another stressful practice conducted by businesses, in connivance with mobile service providers. They use it to drown subscribers with tonnes of unsolicited mail. Service providers are the biggest culprits and seem to be wading on the shores of impunity.

They should learn to respect their subscribers’ privacy because they are not business partners, if that was the case, the advertising revenues would also trickle down to the customers.

Though the cases are very rare in Rwanda, in some more advanced countries, it was a bitter fight to bring the habit of cyber-squatting under control. People rushed to register domain names of new companies and organisations with the hope that the latter would buy them out.

Decades ago, that was regarded as a smart, lucrative investment; today it is nothing more than daylight robbery in advance.

The cyber-crime law could not have come at a better time as Rwanda is building its development on a firm ICT foundation. The speed by which things were progressing needed to plug many gaping loopholes, and we have not seen the end of it yet