David S. Wall

Cybercrime, media and insecurity: The shaping of public perceptions of cybercrime

All too often claims about the prevalence of cybercrimes lack clarification as to what it is that is particularly ‘cyber’ about them. Perhaps more confusing is the startling contrast between the many hundreds of thousands of incidents of cybercrime supposedly reported each year and the relatively small number of known prosecutions. This contrasting evidence exposes a large gap in our understanding of cybercrime and begs a number of important questions about the quality of the production of criminological knowledge about it. For example, how reliable and partial are the informational sources that mould our opinions about cybercrime. Do we fully understand the epistemological differences between the various legal, academic, expert and popular (lay) constructions of cybercrime? Alternatively, is the criminal justice system just woefully inefficient at bringing wrongdoers to justice? Or are there still some major questions to be answered about the conceptual basis upon which information is gathered and assumptions about cybercrime made? This article takes a critical look at the way that public perceptions of cybercrime are shaped and insecurities about it are generated. It explores the varying conceptualisations of cybercrime before identifying tensions in the production of criminological knowledge that are causing the rhetoric to be confused with reality. It then contrasts the mythology of cybercrime with what is actually going on in order to understand the reassurance gap that has opened up between public demands for Internet security and its provision.

CYBERCRIME AND THE CULTURE OF FEAR

This article maps out the conceptual origins of cybercrime in social science fiction and other ‘faction’ genres to explore the relationship between rhetoric and reality in the production of knowledge about it. It goes on to illustrate how the reporting of dystopic narratives about life in networked worlds shapes public reactions to technological change. Reactions which heighten the culture of fear about cybercrime, which in turn, shapes public expectations of online risk, the formation of law and the subsequent interpretation of justice. Finally, the article identifies and responds to the various mythologies that are currently circulating about cybercrime before identifying the various tensions in the production of criminological knowledge about it that contribute to sustaining those mythologies.

Cybercrimes: New Wine, No Bottles?

Over the past two decades, the concept of cyberspace has developed from science fiction into a socially constructed reality (Benedikt, 1991; Gibson, 1984). It is now: ‘a place without physical walls or even physical dimensions’, where ‘interaction occurs as if it happened in the real world and in real-time, but constitutes only a “virtual reality”’ (Byassee, 1995: 199; Tribe, 1991: 15). The inhabitants of cyberspace are a virtual community of ‘social aggregations that emerge from the Net2 when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace’ (Rheingold, 1994: 5). Only time will tell whether or not this virtual community will become Saradar and Ravetz’s ‘new civilisation which emerges through our human-computer interface and mediation’ (1996: 1). What is certain is that the Internet creates considerably more opportunities for individuals to come into contact and to interact with others socially, economically and politically. Furthermore, as the ‘intellectual land grab’ (Boyle, 1996: 125) takes place for cyberspace, the emerging political economy of information capital will cause interests to become established and new distinctions to emerge between acceptable and deviant behaviour. Not only do new risk communities now accompany the old, but many previously acceptable activities have become relabelled as undesirable and now sit next to those behaviours which have been traditionally accepted as undesirable.

Catching Cybercriminals: Policing the Internet

This article seeks to contribute to the existing debate(s) over the governance of cyberspace by focusing not upon legal frameworks, which have been already been the subject of much good work, but upon the enforcement of law. What is missing from much of the recent debate has been a substantive discussion of some of the practical problems of policing the Internet, such as by whom and how it should be (is being) policed. Such considerations are becoming increasingly important as the inhabitants of cyberspace multiply in number. It is argued that much of the debate over the policing of the Internet has tended to be driven by moral panics. As these panics subside it is becoming clear that there is clearly a confusion in the literature between the potential and actual harms that can be inflicted by cybercrimes. Consequently, we must be wary of reports which exaggerate the extent to which cybercrimes have proliferated, especially when those reports appear to originate from bodies who are currently engaged in th...

Policing Identity Crimes

Identity-related crimes pose a significant problem to both the UK economy and also its citizens because they cause estimated annual losses of around £1.5billion. Not only do identity crimes cause considerable public concern, but they also create challenges for policing them; not least, because policing responses, in the broader regulatory sense, are often over-reactive or take the form of dramatic Public Relations gestures rather than coherent policing policy. Yet, the realities of identity-related crimes are quite different from the ways that they are perceived and even more important is that fact that this difference presents many challenges for those whose job is to ‘police’ them. This article will look at what identity crimes are and at the very real problems they pose for policing them as non-routine policing activities. The article will, firstly, map out identity crimes and outline the behaviours that we understand as identity crimes and their core characteristics. It will then consider how the characteristics map onto traditional police practice and consider some of the ways that the challenges have been addressed.

Mp3: The Beat Bytes Back

MP3 has become the first major buzzword of the 21st Century. Love it or hate it, MP3 is here to stay, but will it lead to the death of the popular music as we know it, or will it revitalise an industry that many believed was already in a state of decline. The early evidence suggests that it is unlikely that MP3 will cause the demise of either the record industry or of copyright law, but it is certainly the case that MP3 and its associated technologies will have a transformative effect upon both. This article explores the debates that MP3 has given rise to and evaluates the role that law is playing in shaping the future of contemporary popular music.

Policing Elvis: Legal Action and the Shaping of Post-Mortem Celebrity Culture as Contested Space

Celebrity cultures are neither benign nor static, they have their own careers during and beyond the lives of their creators. While they are shaped primarily by creativity and sustained by market forces, as soon as celebrity is created it becomes a contested space and a power struggle ensues. This article explores the use of legal and quasi-legal actions in the shaping of celebrity culture as contested space. It draws upon an analysis of the post-mortem career of Elvis Presley to illustrate how our knowledge of Elvis has been formed by the various legal actions which assisted the passage of his name, image and likeness from the public to the private domain and also the various ‘policing’ governance strategies that have since been employed to maintain control over the use of his image. Central to the discussion is an exploration of the paradox of circulation and restriction, whereby the holder of an intellectual property right in a celebrity culture needs to circulate it in order to exploit its popularity and thus generate income streams, while simultaneously regulating the ways that the celebrity culture is consumed in order to maintain legal control over it in order to preserve those same income streams. The ‘paradox’ arises from the observation that, on the one hand, too much open circulation of a celebrity culture can lead to the development of secondary or even generic meaning that not only threatens the holder’s exclusive rights over the property, but also has the potential to demean, debase or even destroy the overall integrity of the culture. On the other hand, too much restriction through over zealous control could effectively strangle the celebrity culture by killing off sensibilities of personal ownership and affiliation.

The Devil Drives a Lada: The Social Construction of Hackers as the Cybercriminal

A senior police officer recently described to me a serious dilemma that he had just faced. The officer had received reliable intelligence that a serious financial crime had been committed by an East European Mafia group using a computer located within his police force area. Early one morning, anticipating stiff resistance, he sent an armed unit to the house containing the computer. After breaking down the door, his officers were shocked to find a sleepy breakfasting family, rather than the violent mafia gang they had expected to meet. On this occasion, the police had chosen the wrong course of action, because the family’s computer had been infected by malicious software and used remotely by fraudsters as part of a botnet (robot network).

Micro-Frauds: Virtual Robberies, Stings and Scams in the Information Age

Network technologies have shaped just about every aspect of our lives during the past two decades: not least the ways that we are now victimised. From the criminal’s point of view net technologies act as a force multiplier of grand proportions providing individual criminals with personal access to an entirely new field of ‘distanciated’ victims across a global span. So effective is this multiplier effect that there is no longer the compulsion to commit highly visible and risky multi-million dollar robberies when new technologies enable them to commit multi-million one dollar thefts from the comfort of their own home, with a relatively high yield and little risk to themselves? So, the most common use of computers for criminal gain is to fraudulently appropriate informational goods, not just money. For the purposes of this discussion the term ‘micro-fraud’ is used intentionally. This is because most of the victimisations are not only informational, but also networked and globalised. They also tend to be individually small in impact, but so numerous that they only become significant in their aggregate. Conceptually, micro-frauds are those online frauds that are deemed to be too small to be acted upon and which are either written off by victims (typically banks) or not large enough to be investigated by policing agencies. These qualities distinguish the micro-fraud from the larger frauds that do also take place online and which tend to capture a disproportionate amount of media attention. Yet, these larger frauds are relatively small in number when placed against a backdrop of the sheer volume of online transactions. Micro-frauds are the opposite, they are highly numerous and relatively invisible. As a consequence, their de minimis quality stimulates a series of interesting criminal justice debates, not least, because micro-frauds tend to be resolved to satisfy private (business or personal) rather than public interests. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to map out online fraud in terms of its distinctive qualities and to outline any changes that have taken place over time. Part one explores the virtual bank robbery in which offenders exploit financial management systems online, mainly banking and billing. Part two looks at the virtual sting and at the way that offenders use the Internet to exploit system deficiencies to defraud businesses. Part three focuses upon the virtual scam, which is the techniques by which individuals are ‘socially engineered’ into parting with their money. The final part discusses the prevalence of micro-fraud and some of the issues arising for criminal justice systems and agencies.

Dis-Organised Crime: Towards a Distributed Model of the Organization of Cybercrime

There exists a widespread and uncritical assumption that the internet and society have been brought to their knees by Mafia-driven organised crime groups. Yet, this rhetorical narrative is not supported by research into the organisation of online crime groupings which finds that the organisation of crime online follows a different logic to the organisation of crime offline, a difference which is also reflected in other organised crime groupings though with different actors. Such findings identify instead a ‘disorganised’ or distributed model of organization, rather than a hierarchical command and control structure. This article maps out the logic behind the organisation of criminal behaviour online before looking critically at the organised cybercrime debates. It then draws upon a simple analysis of the structures of known cybercrime groups and then three case studies of different cybercrime types to explore their organization.