Considering the Role of E-government in Cybercrime Awareness and Prevention

Cybercrime has exponentially increased in recent years as an unavoidable byproduct of greater internet use, generally, and presents a wide range of criminal threats to large companies and individuals alike. While cyber offenses (e.g., cyberharassment, cyberstalking, identity theft, and intellectual property theft) and their address have been examined across diverse academic disciplines including criminology, electrical engineering, sociology, and computer science, minimal consideration has been given to the role of e-government in combating cybercrime – a somewhat ironic oversight given the computerized context of both. After reviewing the nature of cybercrime, this chapter considers e-government policies addressing cybercrime awareness, prevention, and victimization services. Discussion centers on the prospects for cybercrime theoretical research program development toward best practices public policy.

Human Factors in Implementing E-Government in Developing Countries

Even today only modest gains have been made since the implementation of E-Government. A veritable plethora of human factors affect the success, or failure, of technology initiatives like E-Government. These human factors include everything from simple resistance to change and peer pressure to more complex factors brought about by the value pluralism that exists in today’s increasingly global society and its impact on technology acceptance. This chapter seeks to initiate a dialogue in which the broad range of issues and challenges for implementing E-Government can be discussed. It includes data and anecdotal information acquired from citizens, government managers, and experts in the field. This chapter also includes a discussion about reducing the risk associated with ICT initiatives such as E-Government by applying principles of systems engineering, usability engineering and human-computer interaction. Further, this article describes how risk reduction can be achieved by taking a phased approach to E-Government implementation.

Images of Citizenship

Local government websites are the primary place citizens interact with their local governments online. This research presents qualitative and quantitative content analyses of local government websites in the United States. It investigates these websites with respect to the participatory and consumer citizenship roles reflected and structured through their design. The websites are evaluated regarding their usability with respect to consumer and participatory interactions as well as the symbolic content framing users’ interactions. While both participatory and consumer interactions were equally accessible in 2003, longitudinal analysis shows that governments are facilitating consumer interactions without a corresponding increase in participatory usability. Additionally, an evaluation of the symbolic content of the websites reveals that almost universally, they emphasize a consumer mode of interactions over a participatory mode of interactions. A detailed qualitative analysis shows that participatory aspects are subordinate to consumer dimensions and that political content is cast to discourage dissenting political interactions.

Assessing China's E-government and Its Impact on Government and Citizen Relationship

The goal of this chapter is to examine the e-government development in China and its political impact on the communist countries’ transition to democracy by transforming relations between the government and citizens. It is widely accepted that e-government can help to encourage government transparency, expand the information flow, promote work efficiency and increase citizens’ political participation. This may be true in open democracies, yet there is little scholarly support for this conventional wisdom applied in authoritarian societies. This chapter will test hypotheses that e-government can improve the quality of government by enhancing citizens’ accessibility to information and service, increasing citizens’ political participation and promoting citizen outreach of the Chinese government. The chapter will indicate that e-government is transforming relations between citizens and the Chinese government and show how it is playing an essential role in China’s incremental process of democratization.

Evaluation of E-government Services

Do e-government services meet citizens’ needs? This chapter examines the performance of e-government services from a citizen-centric perspective. This chapter, taking the Kaohsiung Citizen Electronic Complaint System (KCECS) in Taiwan as a case study, identifies satisfaction and service quality as evaluation indicators when assessing e-government services. The empirical results show that citizens perceive moderately positive satisfaction toward the e-complaint service, and that a citizen-centric approach for evaluating e-government service is desirable. Complaint resolving ability makes the most contribution to the overall satisfaction of e-complaint service, but remains the top priority for improvement of the KCECS. Some solutions are proposed to help public officials to meet citizens’ needs and thus better serve citizens.

Community Policing in India

‘Community policing’, a major reform in policing, broadens the police mandate beyond the traditional focus of fighting crime to addressing community problems through a personalized approach that draws citizens into the process of policing themselves. Emulating this movement, the Police Administration in numerous states of India have recently engaged in community policing through e-governance specifically tailored to meet the diverse needs of their populace. Two such case studies, eCOPS in Andhra Pradesh and Lokvani in Uttar Pradesh are discussed showing the multifold benefits of such a movement in increasing transparency, trustworthiness, and efficiency of the police administration. The chapter concludes by making a bid to foster this symbiotic digital mode of interaction between the police and citizens by introducing domain specific performance measures. Such measures will allow for easy monitoring, revising, and garnering national support to institutionalize, validate, standardize, facilitate, and promote these programs to help create a proactive all-hazards resilient citizenry for the future.

Engaging Citizens Through Local e-Government

The early moves to e-Government in Australia were prompted by factors such as government reform, the need to reduce costs and the desire to improve the effectiveness of service delivery. Often these were the objectives of higher levels of government rather than individual councils in the local government sector. While there have been significant improvements in many areas of local e-Government, a number of local councils in Australia particularly those in rural communities are yet to have enhanced their web-based services. The chapter will report on the progress local government in Australia have made towards e-Government implementation, specifically on citizen access to electronic service delivery. The chapter provides a background to the types of electronic information and services provided by local government in Australia and recent moves in Australia to enhance citizen involvement. The research identifies many of the internal and external pressures on local government which are often different from those at higher levels of government. At the local government level, where a significant number of citizen-to-government transactions occur in Australia, e-Government can be as much a barrier as it can be an enabler for citizen access to information and services. The result for local government is often a varied and at times confused approach to e-Government.

Factors Influencing Intention to Use e-Government Services Among Citizens in Malaysia

With the liberalization and globalization, Internet has been used as a medium of transaction in almost all aspects of human living. This study is investigating the factors that influencing the intention to use e-government service among Malaysians. This study integrates constructs from the models of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) which been moderated by culture factor and trust model with five dimensions. Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 195 respondents. The result of the analysis showed that trust, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, compatibility, perceived relative advantage and perceived image respectively has a direct positive significant relationship towards intention to use e-government service and perceived complexity has a significant negative relationship towards intention to use e-government service. While perceived strength of online privacy protection and perceived strength of data integrity have a positive impact on a citizen’s trust to use e-government service. However, the uncertainty avoidance (moderating factor) used in the study has no significant effect on the relationship between the innovation factors (compatibility, complexity, relative advantage and image) and intention to use e-government service. Finally in comparing the explanatory power of the entire intention based model (TAM, DOI and Trust) with the studied model, it has been found that the DOI model has a better explanatory power.

Engaging Citizens on the Internet

Some literature on E-government has envisioned that the internet would foster a linear progression toward new, productive, and more democratic relationships between governments and citizens (Layne and Lee, 2001). Recent literature has questioned the pace at which these relationships are developing (Coursey and Norris, 2008). This chapter presents empirical results relating to citizen-government relations on the internet that are based on an assessment of the worldwide web presence of 428 local governments in northeast Ohio. Northeast Ohio provides a useful picture of E-government-citizen relationships because it includes a range of local government forms (counties, townships, etc.), urban and rural populations, and Midwestern influences that many consider “typical” of American states. The website reviews conducted assess citizen-government engagement in a variety of areas. The measures used include simple engagements such as the ability to sign up for email updates and the presence of event calendars to more involved interactions such as blogs, e-pay services, and open records requests. Using these measures, we assess citizen-government engagement among local governments in our sample. Follow up interviews with local governments that rate high on these measures are used to further ascertain the extent of engagement and the benefits they yield for government-citizen relationships and service delivery. This information, in turn, provides lessons relating to citizen-local government relationships that may be useful to other government entities. Analyses to ascertain why some local governments seek greater internet engagement with citizens than others are also be conducted.

Assessing e-Government Services

Introduction of Electronic Government (e-Government) is seen as a tool to improve government service delivery to external and internal clients for the benefit of the government and the citizens and businesses that it serves. E-Government holds tremendous promise for improvements in the public service delivery as well to overcome many of the persistent public service problems. Successful delivery of online services has rapidly become an important measure of effective public sector management. The e-Government initiative in Malaysia was launched with the aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government service delivery to its stakeholders, namely, citizens and businesses. The vision of e-Government is a vision for people in government, business and citizenry working together for the benefit of Malaysia and all of its citizens. The dual objectives of e-Government are to reinvent the government of Malaysia in terms of service delivery through the use of information technology and to catalyze the successful development of the Multimedia Super Corridor with IT as one of the leading sectors of the economy. One of the services that was launched as part of e-Government Flagship is on line tax filling or known as e-Filing by the Inland Revenue Board. Via this system, the taxpayers are able to complete an electronic application form and the necessary payment details within few keystrokes and hence complete their revenue declaration within minutes. The purpose of e-Filing service is to encourage every taxpayer to submit their income tax return through an online system, thus reducing the manual paper-based submission method. This system has received good response from the taxpayers. However, there is still a sizeable number who have yet to adopt e-Filing. An empirical assessment of adoption of e-Filing system involving 200 tax payers was carried out. The study aims to assess the extent of e-filling acceptance among the tax payers who have filed their tax forms online. Beyond this, the chapter also analyses the factors that contribute towards adoption of such system in Malaysia. The findings revealed that taxpayers have positive attitude in using the e-Filing system as they perceive that tax submission method via internet is more convenient than submission by post or by hand and that perceived readiness towards using this technology is paramount to their belief for using e-Filing system.