Technocrime and Criminological Theory

Kevin Steinmetz,Matt R. Nobles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498745598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

Cybercrime, computer crime, Internet crime, and technosecurity have been of increasing concern to citizens, corporations, and governments since their emergence in the 1980s. Addressing both the conventional and radical theories underlying this emerging criminological trend, including feminist theory, social learning theory, and postmodernism, this text paves the way for those who seek to tackle the most pertinent areas in technocrime.

Technocrime and Criminological Theory challenges readers to confront the conflicts, gaps, and questions faced by both scholars and practitioners in the field. This book serves as an ideal primer for scholars beginning to study technocrime or as a companion for graduate level courses in technocrime or deviance studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Kevin F. Steinmetz and Matt R. Nobles

Recent events have indicated turbulence for information security. Internet giant Yahoo confirmed that the personal information of half a billion of its users had been compromised two years prior (Greenberg 2016). Saber-rattling between the two US presidential candidates – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – frequently invoked the threats posed by criminals and foreign governments across a range of information security issues (e.g. Wheaton 2016). Grumblings were heard about the potential for election tampering via compromised equipment (Newman 2016). A group going by the moniker “TheShadowBrokers” claimed to have stolen National Security Agency computer security tools in a compromise of an affiliated organization which they then tried to sell (and subsequently expressed frustration when seemingly no one would purchase said tools) (Jones 2016). Oliver Stone’s (2016) Snowden hit theaters, exploring the events surrounding Edward Snowden and his leak of classified information to journalists about US Government surveillance capabilities. Sam Esmail’s (2015) Mr. Robot – a show about a computer security engineer and hacker battling perceived economic injustice and his personal demons – completed its second season and garnered multiple awards including Golden Globes and Primetime Emmys. During this period, all eyes appeared to be on information security and technological offenders.

Despite such fascination and fear surrounding information security, criminology has struggled to make sense of the litany of technocrimes and security issues emerging in today’s late modern, globalized landscape. One reason for such deficiency is methodological – technocrimes are notoriously difficult to study. Crime and deviance in general are often mired in secrecy. After all, one does not generally conduct illicit affairs in the open for worry of reprisal. With computer technologies and the Internet, however, such activities are further obscured because of the very architecture of these systems as well as the variety of privacy-protecting tools available. Accessing technocrime offenders is thus an arduous – though not insurmountable – task.

Conceptual and theoretical matters, however, may be more significant in explaining criminology’s struggles with technocrime and information security. Technology develops at such a breakneck pace that trying to keep abreast of such change is challenging. Explanations and concepts forged for one arrangement of technocrimes may quickly become outdated and in need of retooling once the social, cultural, and technological landscape shifts. The emergent terminology surrounding information security issues – most notably the prefix “cyber” – may also confound more than clarify. For example, imprecision in the application of “cyber” to various forms of non-virtualized, technology-facilitated crime and deviance (malicious GPS tracking, drone-enabled voyeurism, credit card “skimming,” and so on) suggest that our operationalizations are insufficient for capturing the true range of technology misuse, both realized and unrealized. Relatedly, many technocrime issues are mired in myths and mythologies that can make appropriate conceptualizations of phenomena difficult (Wall 2008; Yar 2013). We argue that many of these issues, however, stem from a broader problem confronting criminology: a staunch lack of theory and theorizing in the area of technocrime.

This paucity is at the heart of this volume. Criminology has a robust canon of theories at its disposal. Little time, however, has been spent riffling through our collective theoretical lexicon to seriously consider the value of such theories to technocrime research and how they might best be leveraged. Some studies in the area do make use of criminological theories. For the most part, the application of theory in this research is often superficial, at best, using measurement and conceptual tools designed for more “traditional” forms of crime and applying them to technocrimes with little consideration for changes in criminal context and processes. Instead, we argue that academics need to ruminate deeply on the potential applications of such theories – how can these theories be retooled for the contemporary technological context? How can certain theories unite our understandings of certain technocrime issues with other forms of crime? Are certain theories useful for dissecting the lived experience of technocrime? Can others illuminate the macro-structural context in which these offenses are enmeshed? Though some authors have taken such matters seriously (for example, Holt and Bossler 2014, 2015; Diamond and Backmann 2015), we argue that a gap persists within this emergent subfield of criminology regarding these theoretical points of inquiry. These questions, and others, are considered across the various chapters in this volume thus providing a Rosetta Stone for interpreting technocrime and information security phenomena for criminologists across the spectrum.

Before detailing the chapters contained in this volume, the reader may be curious about the particular choice of terminology adopted herein: “technocrime” instead of “cybercrime.” After all, the latter term has largely become the de facto nomenclature within public and academic discourse to refer to any crime, deviance, or malfeasance related to human-computer interactions. Yet, we have chosen to buck the trend. This decision was not necessarily because we are contrarians (though some may disagree). Instead, it stems from deep concerns surrounding definitional ambiguities oscillating around the prefix “cyber.”

“Cyber” originally emerged from “cybernetics,” a term coined by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth in the 1940s (Wiener 1948). Cybernetics was crafted as a “neo-Greek expression to fill the gap” they saw in the sciences, which they derived from a Greek word for “steersman” (Wiener 1948: 19). It was originally envisioned as the study of feedback and control mechanisms within systems. In its inception, “cyber” enjoyed no links specifically to computer systems. This link was cemented decades later with the rise of personal computers and technological subcultures. The term was co-opted in the 1980s by Bruce Bethke (1983) in his short story “Cyberpunk.” As Bethke (2010) has stated, the term emerged as he was,

actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology … my reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.

The decision to use “cyber” was driven because of the way it sounded – not necessarily for its definitional adequacy. The prefix took off in science fiction literature during this period, perhaps most notably in the work of William Gibson who popularized the term “cyberspace,” originally created in the 1960s by Dutch artist Susanne Ussing and architect Carsten Hoff (Lillemose and Kryger 2015).

During the 1980s, public fascination with computers skyrocketed, coinciding with the mass production of personal computers. Pop culture treatments of technology and its users, such as the 1983 film War Games, only further intensified this enthrallment (Skibell 2002). Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, cyber became a fashionable way to discuss anything digital – cyberspace, cyberpunk, cybercitizen, cybercommunity, and even cybersex. This period was also marked by increased anxieties over computers and their users. As Yar (2014) argues, our society is laden with utopian visions of the wonders that computers and similar devices can bring – better living through technology. These visions, however, are often accompanied by anxieties over the danger posed by technology and, more importantly, the people who have mastery over computers and networks (most notably hackers). Cyber became a prefix pregnant with the promise of technology … for better or worse.

In 2013 during a panel on electronic civil liberties issues at DEF CON (the largest hacker convention in the world which takes place annually in Las Vegas), one of the editors of this volume heard a representative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation proclaim that “the only people who use the term ‘cyber’ are those who don’t know any better or are trying to scare you.” There is a great deal of truth in this statement. While in contemporary times terms like cyberspace and cybersex have fallen by the wayside as contrived or cliché, the dystopic connotations of cyber seem to persist. Cybercrime, cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, and even cyberjihad are all the rage within politics, pop culture, public discourse, and – unfortunately – the academy. Through a kind of semiological alchemy, cyber has been transformed over time from linguistic lead to political gold; once associated with relatively mundane feedback systems, the term now evokes fear and fascination with the utopic or dystopic potential of technology. Cyber, however, is really a terminological “fool’s gold” – it is flashy but brittle with definitional ambiguity.

Academics maintain an enduring love affair with “cyber” for multiple reasons. The prefix is easily deployed to lend technological gravitas to a topic. Saying that a person studies “cybercrime” raises eyebrows. Stating “Internet/computer-related crimes,” however, closes eyelids. It has thus become ensconced in the criminological canon; it is just the accepted nomenclature. Terms like “cybercrime,” “cyberterrorism,” and “cyberwarfare” proliferate across scholarly books, articles, journals, and other artifacts of academic currency. From this perspective, adopting “cyber” is a practical measure – so much so that even some of the authors in this volume deploy cyber within their chapters. Yet, we as editors have chosen to eschew the term precisely because of the connotations which have become associated with the prefix. “Cyber” is mired in the politics of fear. It is bad enough that criminologists are burdened with “crime” and all the symbolic baggage it brings. Attaching “cyber” to “crime” invites only more conceptual irrationality and ambiguity to the discussion. It offers little (if any) conceptual precision compared to other terms (there is not even clear agreement about what “cybercrime” even means).

For our volume, we have instead elected to use “technocrime,” a term we appropriated from the work of Stéphane Leman-Langlois (2013: 3), which is broadly defined as “behaviour presented and treated as worthy of the responses typically accorded to crime: seizures, arrests, warranted (and warrantless) surveillance, prison, fines, community work, etc., whether we agree with this criminalisation or not.” This definition hinges not necessarily on the behaviors themselves, but on the interpretations and subsequent reactions to such behaviors. In the contemporary landscape, these crimes are shaped just as much by social, cultural, and political interpretation as they are by technology and technological change. Or, as Leman-Langlois (2008: 1) has stated elsewhere:

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.

Terms like “cybercrime” tend to masquerade as objective phenomena in the realm of technology and the hard sciences. When such terms are invoked, we collectively assume that such concepts seem “closer to the natural laws that gave us computers than to the artificial laws that gave us crimes” (Leman-Langlois 2008: 4). While technocrime, as a concept, is similar to that of cybercrime in its ambiguity, technocrime acknowledges the multi-dimensional qualities of the phenomena under investigation while cybercrime tends to feign objectivity. Rather than make any pretense of a concrete definition of the phenomena under question, we have chosen a term that embraces the interpretive and reactive elements of such offenses and at least mostly divorces itself of the semiotic baggage linked to cyber.

This understanding of technocrime also recognizes that many crimes involving computers and networks are, in fact, relatively mundane, variegated in success rates, and similar in form and process to other kinds of crime. Rather than view such behaviors and actors as fantastical, our perspective recognizes that “technologically minded criminals are not mainly the unstoppable, invulnerable super-villains they are often portrayed to be – especially when file-sharing ‘pirates’ are thrown into the mix. In fact, in most cases they are rather inane” (Leman-Langlois 2013: 5). This is not to say that there are not unique qualities of technocrimes worth considering. As Yar (2013: 11) explains, the Internet “variously ‘transcends’, ‘explodes’, ‘compresses’, or ‘collapses’ the constraints of space and time that limit interactions in the ‘real world.’” Further, computer and network technologies can amplify the scope and scale of offending while also enabling “the manipulation and reinvention of social identity” (Yar 2013: 11). Our point is that it is easy for the differences to overshadow the similarities. Further, in today’s globalized, late modern society, drawing firm distinctions between technocriminal behaviors and more “traditional” forms of crime can become difficult. From burglars exploiting social media geolocation features to drug producers and distributors employing the Internet to facilitate their enterprise, an increasing array of criminal behaviors take advantage of computers and electronic networks. Thus, delineating clearly between technocrimes and other forms of crime seems to hinge on interpretation more so than any particular characteristics inherent in criminal acts or actors themselves.

In this capacity, technocrimes tread on ground relatively familiar to criminologists – definitions of crime are the result of a social process whereby certain behaviors and persons are construed as deserving of scrutiny or punishment (Becker 1963; Quinney 1970). For criminologists, this is actually good news. Rather than view technocrimes as some exotic behavior to be explained through specialized theories, the entire criminological canon can be brought to bear on these crimes, including theories of crime, criminality, as well as social reactions to crime and criminals. Work is always needed to calibrate or modify theories but there may be little need to reinvent the wheel entirely for technocrimes.

This volume pulls together a wide assortment of scholars from across the criminological spectrum to provide insights into the relationship between criminological theory and technocrime research. In particular, both “mainstream” and “critical” criminological perspectives are housed within these pages to provide readers of all sorts with something relevant to their own research agendas and personal predilections. First, Alison Marganski demonstrates the value of – indeed necessity for – feminist criminology in the area of technocrime research. She demonstrates that, despite the proclamations of technological utopians that technology would allow us to advance beyond discrimination and inequality based on factors like gender, our society has not escaped gendered power dynamics and abuses in the wires. Revenge porn, online harassment, stalking, sex-related crimes, and other forms of often gendered crime and deviance have emerged or found new life in recent decades, thanks to such technological advances. Marganski thus provides a compelling case that feminist criminology provides a rich foundation for understanding a wide assortment of technocrime activity.

Next, Bradford Reyns contributes an insightful analysis of lifestyle/routine activity theory, identifying translational...