Pt.1 Cybercrime.
In recent years, the vast technological advancement of electronic media has brought upon society the birth of a new era of crime called ‘cybercrime’ and with it a new strain of criminal. These perpetrators for the most part “remain ‘faceless’; the ‘virtual offender’ is able to enter the victim’s personal space.” (Marsh & Melville, 2009).
David Wall (2005) suggests 3 different ways in which in which the internet impacts on criminal opportunity.
1.The internet has become an advanced vehicle for communication that sustains existing patterns of harmful activity through the circulation of information.
2. The internet has created a transitional environment that provides entirely new opportunities for harmful activities currently the subject of existing criminal or civil law.
3. The internet has endangered entirely new forms of (unbounded) harmful activity.
Wall has also developed a fourfold categorization of computer related crime (1999) including cyber violence, cyber obscenity, cyber trespass, and cyber theft. These relatively new forms of crime can be seen reflected not only in the news but other forms of fictional crime media.
In the Criminal Minds episode, entitled ‘ The Internet is Forever’ (s5ep22), the BAU (Behavioural Analysis Unit) of the FBI are assigned to profile and catch a serial killer using the internet as a hunting ground. He installed tiny video cameras in his victim’s houses, allowing himself to have a live webcast of their entire home, and thus their life at his fingertips. Once he learns their routine the unsub murders each female victim while streaming the entire brutal act online to the masses, a broadcast of intense cyber violence.
The fictional unsub in this here depicts characteristics of ‘differential association syndrome’ (Marsh & Melville, 2009), he is so “socialized into the computer underworld that he enjoys the recognition and respect that comes with… ever more daring forms of computer-based crime.” This is shown off when he outwits the FBI agents catching them live on his web stream in the empty victims house to impress his followers and viewers.
The shock value of episodes like these, though purely created for entertainment purposes, act to enhance viewers fear of crime in a ‘that could happen to me’ kind of nature. The sensationalised depictions in fictional media of this particular topic I don’t necessarily view as a having any negative effects. If people feared cybercrime more, and in turn updated their privacy settings on social networking sites, censoring what personal information they disclose, and in turn were monitoring what their children expose over sites such as facebook, we may see a decrease in cyber crime.
A perfect example of this is the recent conviction of John Zimmerman, a 24yr old Melbourne man who was charged with “16 counts of rape, 16 counts of sexual penetration of a child under 16, five of stalking, three of indecent assault, one of threatening to kill and another (4) of procuring a child for pornography” (Lowe, 2010). The offences date back 18 months and involve 3 victims – two of whom were aged 14 and 1 who was 13 at the time. You may ask how a man aged 24 comes in contact with such young girls. Zimmerman, or “Zimmo” he’s known, was the tour manager of an upcoming Australian band The Getaway Plan. This gained him access to thousands of fans, via myspace, facebook, and twitter accounts, all eager to please for a chance to meet the band, and too naive to realise they were being exploited. His “scope for potential victims (was) almost limitless” (Marsh & Melville, 2009). The most shocking thing to me though is that since his arrest in April this year “facebook declined to comment on Zimmerman's page for privacy reasons” (Jackson, 2010). He still has 3 accounts, 2 of which are still on my friends list after meeting him for the first time in 2005, as can be seen below (mostly to observe any updates in his court case and such from family and friends).
Both adults and children alike need to be better educated on the risks they’re taking by surfing the web, not only in conversing with strangers but also in the information they post about themselves, text and photograph wise.
"The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had." - Eric Schmidt
