Now a vice president and the chief information security officer for eBay, Schmidt told delegates at the ICT Outlook Forum in Sydney the new group -- made up of financial services, information technology and e-commerce companies -- aimed to educate the public against identity theft scams, promote technology for preventing the crimes, share information among its members to combat online fraud and lobby the government for stiffer penalties for online criminals.
During an interview with ZDNet Australia , Schmidt said the group is trying to stop identity scammers using the Internet as a medium for fraud that is currently more threatening in the offline world. "The vast majority of these sort of ID theft issues occur offline where people are throwing their rubbish away and not using shredders for credit card information and things of that nature," he said. "Because we've seen that happen in the offline world we think it's very important that we take very proactive steps to protect people in the online world."
On the contentious point of the private sector working with the government, Schmidt says the coalition is not out to take away anyone's right to privacy.
"One of the things that we all have to recognise is the fact that... we're private citizens as well. So anything that would detract from our privacy rights are of grave concern to us," he said. "When we talk about harmonisation of laws it's not creating an environment where we're impinging on people's rights, we're looking at implementation and affirmation of something that's currently on the books and making sure it's implemented."
It's not so much the underlying legislation that's of concern to the new coalition, it's the enforcement, Schmidt says. "One of the reasons a lot of these types of criminals don't get prosecuted is not because we don't have the law, it's because the technical means are not there or law enforcement is not sufficiently trained."
Praising the efforts of Australian state police computer crime squads and the recently established Australian High Tech Crime Centre -- which is hosted by the Australian Federal Police and draws together technical investigation units from various state and commonwealth agencies -- Schmidt told ZDNet Australia the establishment of these types of investigative groups actually helps to safeguard privacy.
"None of these have impacted a person's privacy. They've done a lot to help secure your privacy because without security, without these investigations, your privacy is at risk."
Founding members of the coalition are Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Network Associates, RSA Security, Verisign, Visa, WholeSecurity and ZoneLabs.
