Monique Mann

New public management and the ‘business’ of policing organised crime in Australia:

The globalisation of new public management (NPM) across OECD countries had a profound impact on the administration and management of policing policy and practice. The ideologies of NPM were enthusiastically embraced in Australia in response to high-level corruption with mixed results. This article draws on interviews with senior Australian federal police to explore the policing of organised crime in the context of NPM. Emerging themes concerned the requirement to make the ‘business case’ for resources on the basis of strategic intelligence, recognition of the complexities associated with performance measurement and institutional competition as agencies vie for limited public resources. This article questions the discursive practices of NPM policing and raises questions about notions of ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ for effective police approaches to organised crime.

The Digital and Legal Divide: Silk Road, Transnational Online Policing and Southern Criminology

This chapter explores transnational online policing and the global digital divides that remain wedded to national governance theories, regulatory structures and surveillance practices, largely emanating from the Global North (Carrington et al., British Journal of Criminology, 56(1), 1–20, 2015). The bulk of the world’s digital infrastructure has been developed and is physically located in, or transmitted via, hubs owned by US corporations (Price, Monthly Review, 66(3), 43–53, 2014). This chapter demonstrates how the ensuing transnational ‘information feudalism’ (Drahos and Braithwaite, Information Feudalism. Earthscan Publications, 2002) also produces a form of transnational legal feudalism that reflects power disparities between other English-speaking nations, which are played out in distinct ways through US extraterritorial policing and online surveillance. The Silk Road cryptomarket reveals the importance of Southern Criminology in understanding the transnational implications of these developments.

There is ‘hope for you yet’: The female drug offender in sentencing discourse

Language and gender research has, in recent years, emphasised the importance of examining the context-specific ways in which people ‘do gender’ in different situations. In this paper, we explore how women involved in drug offences, specifically methamphetamine manufacture offences, are constructed within the language of the courts. Thirty-six sentencing transcripts from the New Zealand courts were examined to investigate how such offences, committed by women, are understood. In order to explore the representation of female offenders, a critical discourse analytic approach was adopted. Such an approach recognises that linguistic modes not only create and legitimise power inequalities but also embody a specific worldview. Three gendered discourses were identified in the sentencing texts: (i) the discourse of femininity, reinforcing the socially prescribed female role; (ii) the discourse of aberration, concerning women who breach traditional gender role expectations and, (iii) the discourse of salvation, presenting aberrant women with an opportunity to become ‘good’ women once again. The findings illustrate the ways in which processes of gendering take place within a specific community of practice: the courtroom.

(Big) Data and the North-in-South: Australia’s Informational Imperialism and Digital Colonialism

Australia is a country firmly part of the Global North, yet geographically located in the Global South. This North-in-South divide plays out internally within Australia given its status as a British settler-colonial society which continues to perpetrate imperial and colonial practices vis-à-vis the Indigenous peoples and vis-à-vis Australia’s neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This article draws on and discusses five seminal examples forming a case study on Australia to examine big data practices through the lens of Southern Theory from a criminological perspective. We argue that Australia’s use of big data cements its status as a North-in-South environment where colonial domination is continued via modern technologies to effect enduring informational imperialism and digital colonialism. We conclude by outlining some promising ways in which data practices can be decolonized through Indigenous Data Sovereignty but acknowledge these are not currently the norm; so Australia’s digital colonialism/coloniality endures for the time being.

The Limits of (Digital) Constitutionalism: Exploring the Privacy-Security (Im)Balance in Australia

This article explores the challenges of digital constitutionalism in practice through a case study examining how concepts of privacy and security have been framed and contested in Australian cyber security and telecommunications policy-making over the last decade. The Australian Government has formally committed to ‘internet freedom’ norms, including privacy, through membership of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC). Importantly, however, this commitment is non-binding and designed primarily to guide the development of policy by legislators and the executive government. Through this analysis, we seek to understand if, and how, principles of digital constitutionalism have been incorporated at the national level. Our analysis suggests a fundamental challenge for the project of digital constitutionalism in developing and implementing principles that have practical or legally binding impact on domestic telecommunications and cyber security policy. Australia is the only major Western liberal democracy without comprehensive constitutional human rights or a legislated bill of rights at the federal level; this means that the task of ‘balancing’ what are conceived as competing rights is left only to the legislature. Our analysis shows that despite high-level commitments to privacy as per the Freedom Online Coalition, individual rights are routinely discounted against collective rights to security. We conclude by arguing that, at least in Australia, the domestic conditions limit the practical application and enforcement of digital constitutionalism’s norms.

The legal geographies of transnational cyber-prosecutions: extradition, human rights and forum shifting

ABSTRACT This article describes legal and human rights issues in three cases of transnational online offending involving extradition requests by the United States (US). These cases were selected as all suspects claimed the negative impacts of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were sufficient to deny extradition on human rights grounds. We demonstrate how recent developments in UK and Irish extradition law raise human rights and prosecutorial challenges specific to online offending that are not met by established protections under domestic and internationally sanctioned approaches to extradition or human rights law. In these cases, although the allegedly unlawful conduct occurred exclusively online and concurrent jurisdiction enables prosecution at both the source and location of harm, we demonstrate why national courts hearing extradition challenges are extremely reluctant to shift the trial forum. We conclude by discussing the implications of the new geographies of online offending for future criminological research and transnational criminal justice.