The issue of cybercrime invokes serious concerns from the media, policymakers, politicians, academics and the public, consistently and persistently. The Internet has become a vehicle for communications that sustain existing patterns of harmful activity such as drug trafficking. Is has also created a transnational environment that provides new opportunities for harmful activities that are currently the subject of existing criminal or civil law. One of the main features that distinguish cybercrime from other crimes is its possibility of multiple and instantaneous contacts multiply the occasion to commit crime. It involve non-routine events in which require cross-border investigations or types of deviant behaviour not normally regarded as criminal by policy officers.
Wall (2007) defined cybercrime as a form of media construction and distinguishes it into three typologies: computer integrity crimes, computer-assisted or related crimes, and computer content crimes. Cracking, hacking and denial of service are seen as computer integrity crimes. Scams, virtual robberies and thefts are seen as computer-assisted crimes. Pornography, violence and offensive communications are seen as computer content crimes.
The main problem for policing and action is that, unlike other crimes in which operationally and organizationally local, cybercrimes are globalised. The ambiguity of the Internet itself is that fact that it is in between private and public spaces which increases enormously the difficulty of policing cyberspace. Wall suggests that control over the Internet could be effected either by designing in crime-prevention in order to design out crime, or by increasing levels of security through advanced technological counter measures.
Who is currently policing cyberspace?
It is wrong to think that the Internet is an environment that cannot be regulates. Currently there are five main levels of policing activity takes place within cyberspace:
- 1. The Internet users themselves
- 2. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
- 3. Corporate security organizations
- 4. State-funded non-public police organizations
- 5. State-funded public police organizations
For the Internet users themselves, it is essential that they invest their time and resources in creating and updating open source software programs to protect against cybercrime. Internet Service Providers are encouraged to participate in the improvement and expand the use of open source software, to embrace the valued. The rest levels of policing activities are urged working together to implement effective community policing solutions against cybercrimes. Just as community policing in real space increased the accountability of citizens and diffused the responsibility for preventing crime among the population.
The choices are:
- Choosing a total control future might curtail cybercrime and make the Web a safe vehicle for communication, socializing, commerce, etc., but at a substantial cost to privacy, freedom of speech, as well as other civil liberties.
- Choosing a nobody-in-charge future might allow a free flow of information and exchange of goods and services without government interference, but with a substantial threat to the economic and social lives of individuals and society itself posed by cyberoffenders.
Consider:
Should we tightly control all human interaction by holding individuals responsible for every deed and action in an efficiently networked Web, or should we allow creativity and individualism to emerge by refusing to set boundaries and jurisdictions on the Internet, leaving it much as it is today – without management or enforcement?
Reference:
Wall, D. 2007, Cybercrime, Cambridge: Polity Press, 288 pp.
I agree that the advancement in technology and the emergence of cyber crime have posed new challenges to policing. The cross-national nature of cyber crime, the shift in the avenue of crime from streets to the virtual world and the difficulties in legislating cyber crime all contribute to the transformation of policing structure from the hierarchical top-down model to the horizontal security web in which power to police cybercrimes is no longer concentrated in institutions, organisations or symbolic controllers (Marsh & Melville, 2009: 159). The new role of the police is to “forge new relationships with the other nodes that constitute the networks of Internet security” (Wall, 2007: 184) which include the Internet users themselves, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), corporate security organizations, state-funded non-public police organizations and state-funded public police organizations as you have suggested.
ReplyDeleteMy main concern to this new style of policing is that a larger amount of cybercrime will be created by individuals who are trying to police cyber crime. The rise of internet vigilantism is a good example of policing cyber crimes through sanctions imposed by Internet Users and user groups; it can involve the use of hacking, Distributed Denial of Service, public shaming and possibly, cyberbullying. It is ironic that the very means that individuals use to ‘police’ cybercrimes are in fact the very criminal behaviours which they want to ‘police’ in the first place.
Moreover, this policing style also raises more unsolved questions to policing: how much discretion should be given to individuals in policing cybercrimes through various sanctions? How can those sanctions be regulated so that they will not turn into extreme or criminal behaviour? How can the government protect innocent people from victimized by internet vigilantism? Should freedom of speech and privacy give way to security? How can we distinguish policing by individuals from personal revenges?