Senator Edgardo Angara Thursday pushed for a comprehensive Internet law in the Philippines to curb the rising incidence of online-related crimes in the country.

Angara, chair of the Senate committee on Education, Arts and Culture, said recent studies have shown that a number of crimes and other forms of violations committed over the Internet are rapidly increasing, thus, a stringent law should be crafted that would give heavy penalties to “cybercriminals.”

The Philippines has the highest social networking usage in the Asia Pacific Region with 90 percent of Filipinos frequent users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Angara said citing US-based industry tracker comScore report.

“These numbers reflect the Filipino’s inherent need to establish and maintain ties with the people we care about through social networking sites like Facebook or Friendster,” Angara said.

“However, these immensely popular sites also attract new kinds of illegal activities called cybercrimes. This is why we need to make the Internet safer for our citizens,” he said.

Cybercrime constitutes the downloading and uploading of pornographic materials, hacking, fraud and a host of other destructive activities.

Other activities including e-mail espionage, credit card fraud, spams, and software piracy, financial crimes, sale of illegal or stolen articles, pornography, online gambling, crimes impinging on intellectual property rights, e-mail spoofing, forgery, cyber defamation, and cyber stalking also fall in this category.

Angara said he has filed his proposed cybercrime law where persons found guilty of these acts would be punished with imprisonment of prison mayor or a fine of at least P200,000.

“Preventive measures need to be taken and heavier punishments for violators should be established to protect Filipinos from online crimes,” said Angara.

Angara said the government needs to pursue an upgraded law against Internet-related crimes because the existing Cybercrime Prevention Act, which Congress has passed and enacted by the previous administration seems to be lagging behind the rapid development of the Web.

“A more up-to-date Internet law would be more effective against cybercrimes, especially one that pursues specific violations like hacking and privacy infringement. This target-specific approach would also make it easier to prosecute offenders,” the senator stressed.