Technocrime

Technology, Crime and Social Control

Stéphane Leman-Langlois

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843923862
• eBook ISBN: 9781134002108
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is concerned with the concept of 'technocrime'. The term encompasses crimes committed on or with computers - the standard definition of cybercrime - but it goes well beyond this to convey the idea that technology enables an entirely new way of committing, combating and thinking about criminality, criminals, police, courts, victims and citizens. Technology offers, for example, not only new ways of combating crime, but also new ways to look for, unveil, and label crimes, and new ways to know, watch, prosecute and punish criminals.

Technocrime differs from books concerned more narrowly with cybercrime in taking an approach and understanding of the scope of technology's impact on crime and crime control. It uncovers mechanisms by which behaviours become crimes or cease to be called crimes. It identifies a number of corporate, government and individual actors who are instrumental in this construction. And it looks at the beneficiaries of increased surveillance, control and protection as well as the targets of it. Chapters in the book cover specific technologies (e.g. the use of CCTV in various settings; computers, hackers and security experts; photo radar) but have a wider objective to provide a comparative perspective and some broader theoretical foundations for thinking about crime and technology than have existed hitherto.

This is a pioneering book which advances our understanding of the relationship between crime and technology, drawing upon the disciplines of criminology, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, surveillance studies and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

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Introduction: technocrime

Stéphane Leman-Langlois

Technocrime does not exist. It is a figment of our imaginations. It is simply a convenient way to refer to a set of concepts, practices, frames and knowledges shaping the ways in which we understand matters having to do with the impact of technology on crime, criminals and our reactions to crime — and vice versa: since crime, criminals and reactions also transform technology. Technocrime includes crimes against computers; crimes committed with computers; cybercrimes; and crimes involving credit cards, automated telling machines, communications apparatuses (such as satellite signal theft) or the violation of protection strategies (including alarm systems and CD/DVD copy protection schemes). Technocrime gives rise to technosecurity and technopolice, as sets of various activities explicitly designed to prevent or repress it (for a complete inventory, see Byrne and Rebovich 2007). These responses are openly justified by descriptions of ‘new’ technocrimes, with more lurid or horrifying behaviours calling for stricter laws, restrictions of due process rules and higher enforcement budgets. But it should not be assumed that technopolicing follows technocrimes. It may also simply be the logical extension of security and policing into the high-tech world.

Though private forms of technosecurity are clearly at the vanguard of high-tech crime protection, the state remains the leader in more exotic, generalized forms of applied, high-tech security (national security, military security) — though it relies on private industries for most of the tech provision, of course.

Much has already been written on new technologies, crime and security. Most of it leaves the sociologically inclined mind unsatisfied: crime, like technology, comprises objects not easily observed or measured and it involves various practices. These are sociological objects: they are modified by culture and they modify culture. This book attempts to explore new avenues and to re-examine a number of trends in the literature about crime and technology:

• Technology is a new way of doing crime: the emerging high-tech toolset that criminals have at their disposal makes them more dangerous, to more people — crooks can con better with technology; paedophiles can lure their victims better; and anyone can harass, defame, threaten or blackmail better with technology. In other cases, technology makes criminals dangerous to new people in entirely new ways: previously unthinkable crimes have appeared, such as website defacing, circumventing copy protection schemes, the denial of service attacks and digital rape. Cybercrime and computer crime are the bane of the information society.

• Technology is a new way of doing policing: the policing tech toolbox has drawn much attention in professional publications, in official government reports, in the media and, to a lesser extent, in the scientific literature. New cybercops and netdetectives have been at the centre of news reports. Their cyberwatch and netvigilance outfits have not been thoroughly studied but certainly have grabbed media attention as the new professional, expert police elite, or at least one form of an advanced, future-oriented way of doing policing. New tools in the fight against crime have created controversy, such as the Taser and other so-called ‘less than lethal’ weapons. Others seem drawn from science-fiction movies: pulsed energy projectiles, infra sound, lasers, microwave and chemical riot-disruption weapons, as well as many others.

• Technology is a new way of threatening national security: cyberterrorists have been using advanced steganography and other advanced encryption tools to disseminate crucial information to their accomplices. They have plotted online in chatrooms and on Arabic language bulletin boards. Canadian Momin Khawadja sent UK bomb plotters emails telling them how he could build efficient detonators for them — fortunately, he was caught in the National Security Agency's top-secret SIGINT communication interception net. A ‘cyber Pearl Harbour’ is looming, with attackers targeting essential infrastructures in attempts to cripple economies. They will co-ordinate attacks on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) computer systems and on other targets selected to produce cascading failures along our highly interconnected infrastructures.

• Technology is a new way to protect national security: massive database analysis, information sharing across state and private entities, realtime crime mapping, transaction surveillance, and more efficient communication between security and police entities, as well as within those agencies, will enhance our ability to fight crime, terrorism, subversion, industrial spying and other international threats. It will also help manage emergencies when prevention was insufficient or when natural, unpredictable events occur. Later, technology will help us prosecute, punish and watch those responsible.

• Technology is a new way to encroach on civil liberties: physical surveillance technologies include CCTV and an increasing number of innovations, such as night vision, face recognition, gait recognition, computerized emotional state visual recognition, behavioural analysis and cross-system, camera-to-camera tracking. Physical surveillance also includes satellite imaging, city-wide sound analysis and location, mobile-phone radars, backscatter X-ray and many other technologies in development or already in use. To this must be added information surveillance or ‘dataveillance’ technologies, through biometrics, datamining and database interoperability. Linking those various forms of information and structuring them with social and psychological behavioural models will allow the creation of individual profiles more complete than the image individuals have of themselves.

• Technology is a new way to protect civil liberties: automated systems may see, hear and read everything, but they are devoid of illintentions, have no interest in publishing personal information, cannot benefit from blackmail, are free from political bias and do not care about our sexual preferences, personal quirks or the stupid mistakes we make. Automated systems are programmed to recognize threats to national and personal security only (of course, they are still programmed by humans).

The above contradictions should cause no surprise. Behind the new jargon of technology, mostly influenced by science fiction (for instance, the omnipresent ‘cyber-’ prefix inspired by Willam Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer), hide the same hesitation, controversy, conflicting politics and cultural constructs that have always been integral to all attempts at defining crime and criminals and to devising our responses to them. In fact, much of technocrime shows that constructivist approaches are much more powerful ways to account for reality than conventional, more essentialist or naturalistic approaches. More than ever, crime is what ‘we’ make of it and is ‘real in its consequences’, to paraphrase W.I. Thomas. Furthermore, as the chapters below show, this ‘we’ is more problematic than ever — most obviously when new laws criminalize mass behaviours. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the analysis and nearly all the political discourse about technocrimes, consists of analogies with conventional crimes (filesharing is high-tech shoplifting).

Though much of the activity of the social sciences has also contributed to establish crime as a natural, objective, essential behaviour, the tech language offers an even stronger gloss of objective certainty. Contrary to the social disciplines, technology from the ‘hard’ or natural sciences takes human beings to space, allows remote-controlled surgery, helps us travel around the world, cures diseases, etc. Its less spectacular achievements are closely enmeshed in our daily activities: our work, entertainment, communications, learning, our very awareness of our world. When we are told there is such a thing as ‘computer crime,’ the concept seems closer to the natural laws that gave us computers than to the artificial laws that gave us crimes.

In many ways, technocrime also points to the critical flaws of late-modern society, the fragility of its technological structure, the unknown consequences of the deep demographic and social changes it has triggered and the general insecurity it has failed to alleviate. For others, technocrime encompasses an ordinary voyeuristic fascination with criminal behaviour, intriguing police drama and exciting technological gadgets. Either way, it makes good copy.

In reality, technocrime is a Gordian knot of political interests, economic interests, legal rules, technological developments, police, private security and forensics expertise, mass individual desires, geopolitical strategies and other forms of power we have yet to map. Some of the chapters in this volume, through their investigations of certain forms of ‘crime’ in the cyberworld, show how some of the most fundamental theoretical questions pop up in the most common activities of netizens. Is it possible to ‘rape’ an avatar? Can a virtual object actually be ‘stolen’? (see Chapter 6)? Or are we just pasting our common understandings of damage and tort on new, uncharted regions of human behaviour and stretching language in order to describe things that it is clearly inadequate to describe?

Governing through technocrime

In a recent book, Simon (2007) described the increasing tendency of western societies to organize life with the help of systematic criminalization and police control. Wasteful, dangerous, risky, unhealthy, economically threatening and merely irritating behaviours are constituted into crimes or other forms of penal offences and watched, prevented, repressed and punished with the classical tools of the penal state. The mentally ill, the working poor, children, social assistance beneficiaries, immigrants, drivers and many others are being watched for potential criminal activity. Phenomena previously taken as social problems are now crime problems.

State response to such problems takes two broad forms: first, the penal system is used to individualize responsibility for crimes. ‘Justice’ will make those responsible pay for their actions. The previous failure of mega-social programmes to eradicate a variety of target problems (poverty, addictions, etc.) also helps funnel resources towards individualized conceptions of the problems. While crime was previously taken to be a symptom of social problems, it is not rare today to hear the exact opposite discourse, where poverty, social disorganization and citizens' retreat from public spaces in their neighbourhoods are the symptoms of a deeper crime problem (especially since Wilson and Kelling's famous 1982 paper). Secondly, since crime problems are conceived of as constant, background risks for all citizens, which must be managed through behaviour modification, situational prevention and target-hardening, much of the actual work needed can be left to individual citizens (and their private agents, should they choose — and if they can afford it — to entrust professionals with their security).

Much of technocrime operates in the same way. For instance, cybercrime is being used to justify and to encourage the monitoring of online activities and to create new responsibilities for various actors: parents watching (over) their children, employees watching other employees, employees watching their employers, employers watching their employees, spouses watching (out for) each other, Internet service providers (ISPs) watching their customers and retaining data about their activities online, etc. The cyberworld, much like the real world, is fraught with ill-intentioned individuals who are adept at disappearing into the massive quantity of activities and people online. Therefore, all must be watched.

More than in any other type of late-modern policing, technopolicing involves multiple entities, and conventional, state-centred police organizations are but one actor in the overall production of technosecurity. The actual breadth, depth or intensity of corporate policing online will never be known, but indications are that it is quite extensive. Traditional police organizations routinely ask corporations to produce near-complete investigations and evidence packages before they take over and proceed to submit the case to prosecuting attorneys. This is in part because the police have little resources, both in terms of tech-savvy investigators and analysts and in terms of the technology itself. Corporations and especially those most at risk of cyber-victimization, have, on the contrary, the required know-how, technology and, of course, a much more immediate, pressing motivation. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that actual, concrete surveillance and control of our activities are rampant. Because of dysfunctional technologies, incompetent users, low priority or simply the extremely high number of targets, technosecurity remains (for now) more talk than consequence.

In fact, one interesting aspect of technopolicing is how it is functionally split from traditional, conservative and far more common policing. In the case of conventional crime analysis, civilian expert analysts are typically at the bottom of the police respect/influence ladder. They do not have on-the-street crime experience and are not trained crime investigators; they have not proven themselves in the field; and they are thought of as ‘outsiders’ which, in police culture, means untrustworthy. This attitude is only worsened for analysts who focus on weird, complex or non-physical crimes.

However, a ‘technopolice brigade’ also exists: officers and administrators whose actions and influence pull the other way — the more the tech, the better the policing. The most spectacular success story for technopolice enthusiasts is the adoption of the ‘Compstat’ ethos and technologies, introduced by Bill Bratton in New York in the 1990s, but slowly making its presence felt throughout the world (with various degrees of success; I witnessed a ‘Compstat’ session in Philadelphia in 2005 where crime mapping was at best a form of visual support for an otherwise rather ordinary police briefing). British ‘intelligence-led policing’ (ILP) is also tech-heavy. Compstat relies in part on crime mapping software (MapInfo) and on the experts needed to make it work. However, crime mapping was introduced primarily as a management tool and is only beginning to be used to devise responses to crime. For now, such responses are limited to the conventional forms of increased (visible and invisible) presence and crackdowns. The reasons why crimes occur are deemed immaterial to police work. Paradoxically, then, the new technology has allowed the police to revert to ancient tactics.

Technology certainly permeates policing in one area: in North America and elsewhere, weapons technologies and often military technologies, are increasingly adopted by civilian police forces and by private security services. Many authors (but especially Kraska 1999) have already described how the militarization of policing is mainly driven by the increasing adoption of military weapons and the tactics and strategies they impose. Current controversy about the misuse of electrical pulse weapons, commercialized mostly by Taser International, shows how police safety is currently perceived as depending on the correct technological tools (which would include powerful firearms, bulletproof vests, CS/mace/pepper spraycans, etc.) — in other words, despite declining crime rates, public policing is increasingly seen as an antagonistic, violent, high-danger occupation.

Robots are mission-oriented, autonomous systems and, as such, police robots remain in the realm of science fiction. However, current remote-operated observation and intervention platforms, though always mistakenly referred to as ‘robots,’ do open the way to even more spectacular technologies, like the eventual operation of ‘real’ robots. These are already available on the private market: small devices making random surveillance rounds in empty buildings, swapping their own battery when needed, notifying human watchers when suspicious occurrences are detected; and some can be equipped with weapons. It is difficult, at this time, to imagine how policing, security and crime will be modified by the probably inevitable adoption of such technology — but it is certainly a fascinating exercise.

Strangely, as is apparent in Peter Manning's chapter (Chapter 11), technopolicing, by and large, does not work: 1) it does not reduce crime, it does not make citizens less afraid of crime, it does not make cops happier with their work; 2) it also does not work for purely technical reasons; 3) and, finally, it does not work because it does not match the conception police have of their mission. Of course, one might argue that the situation is not unlike that of conventional policing: though crime will never be eradicated by policing and actual policing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction: technocrime
• 2 Crime and lawfulness in the age of all-seeing techno-humanity
• 3 The local impact of police videosurveillance on the social construction of security
• 4 Cyberwars and cybercrimes
• 5 Policing through nodes, clusters and bandwidth
• 6 Second Life and governing deviance in virtual worlds
• 7 Privacy as currency: crime, information and control in cyberspace
• 8 Information technology and criminal intelligence a comparative perspective
• 9 Scientific policing and criminal investigation
• 10 Sorting systems: identification by database
• 11 A view of surveillance
• 12 Afterword: technopolice
• Index