The Darknet and Smarter Crime

Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy

Angus Bancroft

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030265113
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030265120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Social Sciences

This book draws on research into darknet cryptomarkets to examine themes of cybercrime, cybersecurity, illicit markets and drug use. Cybersecurity is increasingly seen as essential yet it is also a point of contention between citizens, states, non-governmental organisations and private corporations as each grapples with existing and developing technologies. The increased importance of privacy online has sparked concerns about the loss of confidentiality and autonomy in the face of state and corporate surveillance on one hand, and the creation of ungovernable spaces and the facilitation of terrorism and harassment on the other. These differences and disputes highlight the dual nature of the internet: allowing counter-publics to emerge and providing opportunities for state and corporate domination through control of the data infrastructure. 

The Darknet and Smarter Crime argues that, far from being a dangerous anarchist haven, the darknet and the technologies used within it could have benefits and significance for everyone online. This book engages with a number of debates about the internet and new communication technologies, including: surveillance and social control, anonymity and privacy, the uses and abuses of data encryption technologies and cyber-cultures and collective online identities

© The Author(s) 2020

A. BancroftThe Darknet and Smarter CrimePalgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26512-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Crime Is as Smart and as Dumb as the Internet

Angus Bancroft¹

(1)

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Angus Bancroft

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

… and the internet means the many versions of digital ‘you’ in this instance.

What is the relationship between digital society and crime? To understand this question, I have to ask firstly why crimes are committed at all and then how technology both facilitates and drives new forms of crime. When does it make sense to commit crime? Or rather, when was the last time you contemplated a crime? That torrent, online bet, or handy personal use of your employer’s resources, might be tempting and apparently risk-free. Such explanation focuses on when the incentives are right, what is called instrumental rationality. Another consideration is whether it is justifiable crime, a value rationality perspective. These two perspectives are not really in opposition. Instrumental rationality is situational. One needs to cross the moral boundary first in order to begin contemplating the act (Kroneberg et al. 2010). Even the most calculating act takes place in a moral economy (Karstedt and Farrall 2006). People are morally situated towards the free market, society and the law and citizens take their cue from the structured immorality of major institutions being seen to ‘get away with it’. Beyond the cynicism that this embeds in people’s own calculations, what happens when there are moral incentives to commit crime itself? This is a motivational problem. In situations where crime is a value or reward in itself, breaking the law is its own incentive. Crime then can be situationally rational, motivated and meaningful.

Cybercrime is a diminishing, though important, part of digital crime overall. Many people experience digital crime as a hybrid of in-person and internet-mediated crime, rather than solely within the online sphere. These developments are significant for crime control. If crime is rationally motivated, it can be controlled in the same way by managing disincentives and reducing opportunities. Situational crime prevention addresses chosen calculated actions rather than dispositions (Clarke 1980). However, actions must be considered in terms of people’s own sense of their past and future trajectories. If the motivation is longer-term, for example, if people are prepared to take immediate losses for the promise of future gains, or to establish themselves in specific networks, or because they think what they are doing is important enough to take those risks, then situational crime prevention may be limited. Hence we see the surprising resilience of many online criminal markets. Participants want them to succeed (Ladegaard 2017). The issue is then one of cultural, social and infrastructural resilience, its achievement and maintenance, and threats to it.

In one sense, a crime victim may not even be aware that some harm has been done to them. This becomes salient in the context of technology and the ever-growing complexity of law and regulation, which rather undermines the idea that we have effective personal knowledge and responsibility. If aware, the crime victim’s emotional response may be strong but not likely to make them involve the police. Many victims of remote exploitation are too ashamed to report they have been defrauded, or are not even aware that what was done to them was illegal (Goucher 2010). The perpetrator may not know when they are committing a crime. In 1976, a Virginia couple were surprised to find themselves prosecuted having taken polaroids during sex. Their child had taken the pictures to school for show and tell (Edgley and Kiser 1982). The polaroid instant photography system created a fusion of technology and sex which the Polaroid corporation cottoned onto and subtly promoted. Technology creates pathways for behaviour, and people hack it to make new things happen. Some technologies become the focus for public problems. New technologies generate new kinds of crime—in the sense of new routes for criminal activity—and also produce new ways of monitoring and criminalising speech, thought and action. This may be done because the activity's anti-social nature justifies it, or because it is now possible to track and intercept it and what gets done is what is possible (Iginio et al. 2015). Connected societies then face problems of system-generated risk that are not wholly reducible to technological weakness or lack of user awareness. Like the Polaroid couple, the technology allows for behaviours that might be harmful or merely transgressive depending on the purpose and context. Digital technology scales that up. It fuses with opportunity to create behaviour. It is adapted to human use and also shapes human capacities recursively.

In 2019, we see serious examples in which harm and crime is facilitated by technology: revenge porn spread by dedicated websites organised markets in disinfirmation; political speech criminalised by states and public space disrupted; mass-automated attempts to illegally access services. Abuse is workshopped and calculated (Squirrell 2017). Crime is platform driven (Dittus et al. 2017). Criminal markets generate new platforms and use the affordances of existing ones, their visuality, geo-localisation and reputation boosting (Moyle et al. 2019).

There is a range of crime that matters to this book, some of which is ideologically motivated, some opportunity-based. Criminal action depends on an architecture of opportunity that renders personal qualities of honesty suddenly mutable (Mayhew et al. 1976). Vulnerabilities are designed in, and opportunities produced by in the digital infrastructure. These threats are often experienced where there is an interface between different systems, like between cash and electronic money, or between electronic identification and interpersonal trust.

Digital Crime Is Global and Local

A combination of politics and power shapes the digital crime and illicit drug economy in developed and developing countries. Criminal networks can take advantage of contested political authority and state failure and are themselves exploited by political and state actors. On the other hand, digital criminality is often more widespread where there is more developed infrastructure to take advantage of. Major actors legitimate state violence against drug traffickers but ignore state violence against their own populations, activities that partly legitimise drug traffickers. They tend to assume that ‘violence’ only stems from the underclass. Crime follows other lines of exploitation. There is an active remote webcam industry in the developing world that has a large Western and local clientele. In the Philippines, Cam models—sex workers who operate using remote video link—can command higher earnings than prostitutes with whom they emphatically do not identify (Mathews 2017) . The same technologies and systems are used for sexual exploitation. Technology then forms part of integrated harm producing systems.

Harm production systems do not necessarily have to centre the technology while working through it. There is often in public discussion and policy strategies a focus on scams that target the West and launch from the developing world. Most cybercrime and hybrid digital crime operates close to home. The targets of developing world criminals are most likely to be others in the same countries or regions (Mba et al. 2017). In South Africa, scamming is crucial in affecting how people relate to digital technology. Catfishing and phishing scams are common. One common trick is to make cloned mobile sim cards using the victim’s identity. The cards can be sold and victim is landed with the bill. Crimes like this exploit the need for mobile airtime in a situation where the land-based infrastructure is weak, unreliable, untrusted or inaccessible. They exploit the poorest and most precarious, who cannot rely on other systems.

Digital crime is localised and interpersonal, though it draws on globally shared practices and systems. It is not, however, just the old ways made new. Digital crime has its own productive dynamics. The architecture of crime used to exist in the grey spaces left by the licit world. Now, criminal enterprises create their own practices, architecture and technologies and are well-adapted to people’s digital needs. Increasingly, crime is responding to market-driven cost and price signals and it is also generating new logics of opportunity. Its existence is not confined to the underground; it is public, and sometimes barely even illegal. Companies use big data to evade regulation, so crime is not simply a matter of the seamy side (Zwick 2018). Some national governments maintain arms-length stables of cybercriminals, trolls and chaos merchants (Badawy et al. 2018). Digital criminals are better able to exploit this due to their sharing of knowledge, software and hardware. Crime is becoming standardised, copied and extended, without appearing to need to very organised.

The Limits of Digital Crime

There are inherent limits of what can be known about crime, not least the difficulty of reporting some crimes, and being aware of ourselves as plausible complainants. Crime itself cannot be defined entirely by statute and precedent. Law cannot enumerate all. A ‘crime’ means that agreement has been reached between key persons and institutions that a particular activity should be criminalised. It must be reported, recorded and processed as such. Most crimes never get to the reporting stage. Many digital crimes go underreported which limits researchers’ ability to estimate the full cost (Anderson et al. 2013). Some crimes are unnoticed, take place in large numbers but have low individual unit cost, and one category of self-interest crimes is legitimated, widespread and normalised such as copyright violation (MacNeill 2017). These do not invite any social sanctioning and require only the most cursory of self-justifications. Crime, then, is not a single, naturally occurring category, but it is a coherent body of harm, influenced by developments in digital society .

Crime is getting ‘smarter’ because it is becoming better integrated into—and in some cases driving—the underlying digital and financial infrastructure and it adopts key features and norms of that (Powell et al. 2018). Criminals are much better and more agile at making use of the smart infrastructure and they are growing their capacity to learn from each other. This reduces the cost of entry to criminal activity. It also draws more of the licit infrastructure into the criminal infrastructure to the point where there is not much of a distinction between them. To some extent, those involved in digital crime are as governed by similar metrics, incentives and principles as any Youtube influencer or derivatives trader. For example, much criminal entrepreneurship is put into spotting what are effectively arbitrage opportunities, exploiting price differences between different markets (Keegan et al. 201...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Crime Is as Smart and as Dumb as the Internet
• 2. How Cryptomarkets Work
• 3. Fracturing Research in Splintering Digital Environments
• 4. Illicit Trades Are Political Economies
• 5. The Cultural Drug-Crime Confection
• 6. Cybercrime Is Not Always Rational, but It Is Reasonable
• 7. Managing Trust Relationships in Digital Crime
• 8. How Knowledge About Drugs Is Produced in Cryptomarkets
• 9. Creating, Managing and Responding to Risk in Cryptomarkets
• 10. Secrecy and Anonymity Online
• 11. Why Digital Crime Works
• Back Matter