Technology, Crime and Justice

The Question Concerning Technomia

Michael McGuire

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843928577
• eBook ISBN: 9781136464119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

As technology comes to characterize our world in ever more comprehensive ways there are increasing questions about how the 'rights' and 'wrongs' of technological use can be adequately categorized. To date, the scope of such questions have been limited – focused upon specific technologies such as the internet, or bio-technology with little sense of any social or historical continuities in the way technology in general has been regulated.

In this book, for the first time, the 'question of technology' and its relation to criminal justice is approached as a whole. Technology, Crime and Justice analyzes a range of technologies, (including information, communications, nuclear, biological, transport and weapons technologies, amongst many others) in order to pose three interrelated questions about their affects upon criminal justice and criminal opportunity:

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• to what extent can they really be said to provide new criminal opportunity or to enhance existing ones?

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• what are the key characteristics of the ways in which such technologies have been regulated?

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• how does technology itself serve as a regulatory force – both in crime control and social control more widely?

Technology, Crime and Justice considers the implications of contemporary technology for the practice of criminal justice and relates them to key historical precedents in the way technology has been interpreted and controlled. It outlines a new 'social' way of thinking about technology – in terms of its affects upon our bodies and what they can do, most obviously the ways in which social life and our ability to causally interact with the world is 'extended' in various ways. It poses the question – could anything like a 'Technomia' of technology be identified – a recognizable set of principles and sanctions which govern the way that it is produced and used, principles also consistent with our sense of justice?

This book provides a key resource for students and scholars of both criminology and technology studies.

1 Technology and its technomia

I am that which must always overcome itself.¹

What connects the use of CCTV in monitoring public space to the use of malware in committing fraud or the resort to a taser gun in facilitating an arrest? Pointing to the role of technology in each case is a kind of answer, but doesn’t tell us very much. Why, for example, would the use of software to effect the fraud mean that this was a “technological” crime, whilst a theft enabled by using a paperclip to pick a lock was not? In the absence of any robust sense of what technology is, defining crime or control as “technological” has often seemed rather premature, or lacking in clarity. In this chapter I intend to address such questions directly by considering some standard ways in which technology has been defined. I will evaluate these approaches in the light of an alternative, one that I argue both offers a greater flexibility in identifying things as technological and explains why they are social rather than merely inert devices. With this more robust understanding in place we can then better evaluate the role of technology within criminal justice and the extent to which it now enhances or undermines justice.

Technology as “crime”: fire-theft, and subverting the divine order

It is not just the widespread prejudice that technology is “bad” that indicates a criminological imagination at work within our understanding of it. The mythological traditions of many premodern cultures often suggest that merely to acquire technology is for humanity to violate some (divine) order, with any benefits gained always subject to eventual retribution. These primordial fears have been most often seen in mythologies around fire (a regular metaphor for technology), something invariably obtained through trickery, fraud or outright theft.

Within Polynesian mythologies, for example, the ingenuity of the trickster hero Maui helped to secure technologies crucial to humanity, such as language or the art of fishing — though his greatest legacy was the gift of fire, stolen from the goddess Mahuike (cf. Luomala, 1961; Beckwith, 1970). Maui’s primordial “tech-crime” brings inevitable sanctions, for it provokes Mahuike to punish humanity by setting all the land and ocean alight. A similar tale is told in the Hindu text the Rig Veda, this time involving the hero Mātariśvan (sometimes seen as a personification of Agni, the Vedic fire god), who recovers the fire which had been “hidden” from humans by the gods (cf. Marlow, 1954). Elsewhere, the Jewish Book of Enoch (one of the supposed lost books of the Bible) also implies a quasi-criminal origin for technology — this time originating in the actions of “fallen angels” like Azazel, who came to earth bringing fire, metallurgy and astronomical knowledge. An illicit association between angel and human results, producing a hybrid offspring called the Nephilim, who are destroyed when God covers earth with a great flood. Azazel is then bound in darkness until his eventual destruction on the day of judgement (cf. Nickelsburg, 1977). Similar associations between fire/technology and theft can be found almost everywhere — whether in the ancient Sumerian stories of the gifts of civilisation called “Me” and their illicit acquisition, Native American tales of the Coyote who stole fire or the ritual celebrations of fire theft by Ogo, a hero figure to the Dogon tribe of West Africa (Kramer, 1972; Azuonye, 1996; Judson, 1997, p. 40). But perhaps the best known of all such tales (to Western audiences at any rate) has been the Greek myth of the Titan Prometheus, one of the race of the pre-Olympian gods.

One variant of the Prometheus tale was related by Hesiod in his Theogen (2006) where he told how Zeus, the leader of the Olympian gods, was angered at being tricked by Prometheus into accepting an inferior sacrifice from humans, and refuses to permit them the use of fire. But Prometheus — like Maui, Ogo and Mātariśvan — was noted for his resourcefulness and visits Zeus to plead humanity’s case. During this visit, he lights a torch from the Sun’s chariot, conceals it in a stick of fennel and then presents it as a gift to humanity. Zeus is outraged by the theft and orders Prometheus to be tethered to a rock, where his liver is devoured by an eagle — a punishment repeated every day, for all eternity. Humans are punished in equally draconian terms by way of a “gift” from Zeus — the fabled Pandora’s box, which, when opened, spreads misery, disease and suffering in its wake.a ² Later versions of the myth place even greater stress upon Prometheus’ role in bringing technology to humanity. For example, in his Prometheus Bound the playwright Aeschylus has Prometheus point out how

[humanity’s] every act was without knowledge till I came. I showed them the risings and settings of the stars … I invented for them also numbering … All technai [skills/arts] possessed by mortals came from Prometheus.

(Cited in Humphrey et al., 1997, p. 7)

Three fundamental themes within such tales characterise the way our relationship with technology has often been perceived. First, there is the recurring association with lawbreaking already noted — the sense that some basic “flaw” in human nature criminalises our acquisition of technology and is ultimately to blame for the “excesses of technological civilisation” (Winner, 1978, p. 108). A second, less discussed theme has been what makes our acquisition of technology unlawful — a violation of rules determined by a ruling elite (usually signified by the gods) who claim rights of ownership over it. A third theme, one that also parallels many contemporary dilemmas around technology, centres on how best to use what we have acquired. For, whilst Prometheus provided humans with “the wisdom of everyday life” — i.e. the technical means for ensuring their survival — he omitted to provide them with the “civic wisdom” ( politike techne) for using it properly. This may, in the end, have been Prometheus’ greatest crime since,

Without civic wisdom human beings are a menace to themselves, to other creatures, and to the earth itself [for] … technological mastery, without civic wisdom, spells disaster.

(Anderson, 1995)

The implicit criminality associated with our acquisition of technology seems therefore to originate first in a violation of the restrictions placed upon its use by the powerful and second from our failure to understand how best to use it. Both offences inevitably invite retribution — whether from a ruling elite or from nature itself.

These early myths explain a great deal about our frequently ambivalent feelings towards technology, or our readiness to defer to those who appear to “understand it better than we do”. From Icarus’ hubris in flying too close to the sun through to the taboos around artificial life presaged by Mary Shelley’s modern “Prometheus unbound” — the Frankenstein monster, technological use has always come with implications of deviance.

Conceptualising and classifying technology

At first glance what technology “is” seems obvious enough. For most of us, technology is simply what Langdon Winner called “apparatus” (1978, p. 11), complex machine-built artefacts — be they small (like an iPhone), or big (like a jet aircraft). But such certainties begin to unravel almost as soon we press the question further. Since artefacts do not emerge in isolation, but from prior production processes, we might, for example, ask whether technology relates to the artefacts, the methods and materials used to construct them — or both? And if so, what is the connection? A deep ambiguity in our thinking is thereby suggested — technology as “something we do” (i.e. the processes and machinery involved in making artefacts), or technology as “the outcome of what we do” (i.e. the artefacts themselves). Nor is this the only ambiguity. As Mitcham (1994) has suggested, technology might equally be associated with how we know what to do — the skills, techniques and scientific understanding that guide our manipulations of nature and the production of artefacts. This focus upon technology as things (rather than knowledge) has, some have argued, been central to our failure to understand when its use is just, or unjust (cf. Grant, 1991).

It is of course true that theoretical questions around what technology is are of little importance to those — like carpenters or engineers — who make or develop technological things. Indeed the gap between theoretical and practical conceptions of technology has often seemed so profound that two differing traditions have been identified — a “humanities” approach represented by theorists like Heidegger (1949) or Ellul (1964) and an “engineering” approach of the kind seen in the work of Ernst Kapp (1877), or more recently of Norbert Wiener (1948). Each presents its own problems. Viewing technology in terms of its function and design certainly allows for conceptions that are more sensitive to real technical methods and solutions. On the other hand, knowing how to make or do something technological is not necessarily the same as seeing the continuities between distinct technological forms or being able to explain why there are continuities in the first place.

A more direct illustration of the ambiguities that arise in defining technology might be seen when we try to categorise new varieties. Take, for example, the proposed revisions to the International Patent Classification system (IPC) (Table 1.1). This is a legal tool for categorising new technologies, one which opts for typologisation over conceptualisation, and which organises type around technical function. The fact that these were further revisions to revisions already made in the face of new technologies indicates the danger in merely typologising rather than conceptualising technology. It is unclear, for example, whether the scheme defines technology in terms of artefacts or in knowledge-based terms (cf. category 26, “machine tools” in comparison to category 14, “organic fine chemistry”) (Schmoch, 2008). And as a general approach it fails to dovetail very easily with other classification schemes — for example, typologies used in library and information referencing systems (see for example the Library of Congress scheme — LOC, 2009).

Criminologists have also tended to favour typologisation over conceptualisation by limiting their characterisations of technology to its functions within different stages of the justice process. For example, Byrne and Rebovich’s (2007) distinction between “hard” and “soft” technologies may have been useful in linking certain artefacts with certain policing or judicial functions but offered no insights into the nature of technology itself. Bowling et al.’s (2008) more sophisticated framework was also dependent upon a functional typology, this time distinguishing between its “probative”, “punitive”, “surveillant” and “investigative” applications (similar typological approaches can be found in Grabosky, 1998 or Bean, 1999). Beyond these largely descriptive accounts, almost every other discussion of

Table 1.1 Proposed revisions to the international patent classification system for technology (cf. Schmoch, 2008)

	Field of technology
I: Electrical engineering
1	Electrical machinery, apparatus, energy
2	Audio-visual technology
3	Telecommunications
4	Digital communication
5	Basic communication processes
6	Computer technology
7	IT methods for management
8	Semiconductors
II: Instruments
9	Optics
10	Measurement
11	Analysis of biological materials
12	Control
13	Medical technology
III: Chemistry
14	Organic fine chemistry
15	Biotechnology
16	Pharmaceuticals
17	Macromolecular chemistry, polymers
18	Food chemistry
19	Basic materials chemistry
20	Materials, metallurgy
21	Surface technology, coating
22	Micro-structural and nano technology
23	Chemical engineering
24	Environmental technology
IV: Mechanical engineering
25	Handling
26	Machine tools
27	Engines, pumps, turbines
28	Textile and paper machines
29	Other special machines
30	Thermal processes and apparatus
31	Mechanical elements
32	Transport
V: Other fields
33	Furniture, games
34	Other consumer goods
35	Civil engineering

Source: Schmoch (2008).

technology within the field has been limited to accounts of specific forms and their applications (CCTV, the internet and so on) (cf. Lazer, 2004; Pattavina, 2005). As a result there has been little real sense of any continuities between, say, biotechnology and information technology, or fingerprint technology and weapons technology. To develop a more robust sense of technology it is clear, then, that we need to look outside the discipline to some alternative traditions where this question has been posed.

Skill, making and revealing: the classical account of technology

The absence of anything like an industrial revolution in premodern societies ought not to be taken to imply that they lacked technology or eschewed technological thinking. As we will see in the following chapter, this preindustrial period was replete with artefacts and activities that we now think of as “technological” — such as metallurgy, cranes and pulley systems, waterwheels or the use of chariots. Equally importantly, it is here where we find the earliest attempts to conceptualise technical practices — particularly within the Greek world.

It has been common, then, to begin discussions of technology by invoking the etymological root of the term in the Greek word techne. But the fact that this can also translate as “art” is a warning that techne is an ambiguous term from the outset and cannot be taken as a straightforward synonym for technology in the contemporary sense (Roochnik, 1998). Plato associated techne with Socratic ideas of technical skill — a form of “practical” or “practitioner” knowledge which might be contrasted with episteme — theoretical, or perhaps scientific knowledge — the apprehension of nature and reality “as it really is” (cf. Plato, 1997, 477b).³ This skill-based, expert knowledge conception meant that a carpenter was just as likely to possess techne as a doctor — albeit one based on woodworking rather than medicine. Indeed, the practical skills exhibited in techne extend to every kind of human activity — from horsemanship and sculpture to the governance of society. Plato specifically identifies statecraft as a techne, since the maintenance of social order is as much an outcome of good techne as is a woven basket (Plato, 1997, 342e).

Aristotle accepted a distinction between techne and episteme but also associated techne with poiesis, or the revealing of essences — in that “every craft is concerned with coming to be” (1999, 1140a 6ff). Aristotle also suggested that “constructed” things have important differences from “natural” ones, implying that whilst techne may imitate nature, it cannot produce anything natural. Aristotle seems to have anticipated a recurring taboo around technology here — that humans should never try to go “beyond” nature. Some commentators have seen an explicit link in this to the restrictions upon technological development during the medieval, scholastic period when Aristotle’s views remained highly influential (see Blumenberg, 1957). But Aristotle may only have intended to clarify the necessity of observing a structural distinction between nature as a producer of things and humans as producers of things (cf. Schummer, 2001) and in this sense techne can serve to fulfil an inherent “aim” or telos of nature — by supplementing and completing it. Like Plato, Aristotle also held that for techne to contribute towards the development of a civilised society, additional forms of judgement were required to moderate it — specifically, intellectual virtues such as phronesis (practical judgement), sophia (wisdom) and nous (understanding) (cf. Tabachnik, 2009).⁴

The value placed on technical knowledge in the premodern world can be seen in the hugely diverse range of instruction manuals and guides to everything from engineering and architecture (as in Vitruvius) to pharmacology (as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Technology, Crime and Justice
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: the question concerning technomia
• 1 Technology and its technomia
• 2 Foundations: from eotechnic justice to industrial control
• 3 Tele-crime?: Misusing information and communication technologies
• 4 Tele-control: from police whistles to the surveillance society
• 5 Micro-crimes: misusing chemical, biological and nuclear technologies
• 6 Micro-control: CBNTs and the bio-chemical citizen
• 7 Of hammers, hairdryers and handguns: mid- and multi-range technologies
• 8 Technology, science and justice
• 9 The question concerning technomia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index