International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2015 | Page 90

Confronting Cybercrime through Criminology
• Treatment 1: What the cyberworld needs is a highway code—just as the society
of the automobile, in its time, gave rise to its own. This code must be developed
and enforced by a coalition of powerful nations, in the reasonable hope that it will
be enforced worldwide. Another possible image for this indispensable normative
superstructure would be that of the control tower.
• Treatment 2: The Highway Code applies to every vehicle, be it a luxury model or a
more modest car. Similarly, only a code of the cyberworld would effectively penalize
the predators, financial raiders, giants of the net, and others who plunder it with
impunity and exploit its users.
An Agile Worldwide Digital Infrastructure? No, a Fragile One.
Today, the global system of automated data-processing constitutes a worldwide
superstructure. Cyberspace represents a new continent, a new world. And
these new information and communication technologies (ICT) alter the way
in which populations think, believe, behave, and learn.
This applies to the whole population: honest folk, but also wrongdoers. Now, as always,
when humans conquer a new area, it is not long before we see theft, fraud, crime,
propagandist activities, fakery, and lies, among other forms of deviance from social
norms. Cybercrime does indeed exist, and therefore cybercriminals also: in 2013,
Interpol found that, on a global scale, more than 80 percent of online criminality can
be attributed to transnational criminal groups. Today, this cybercrime is the Holy
Grail for every felon. Consider the following:
• A total dissociation of time and distance, offering the ability to
commit a crime at a distance of 10,000 kilometers (cyber-theft).
•Youth that are hypnotized, easy to dupe and infiltrate, in so far as
they see “the world as a set of applications, and their own world as
a series of applications—sometimes even as one single application,
extending from cradle to grave.”
• Cybercriminal masterminds, gang chiefs, or network bosses with
almost guaranteed impunity—today only peripheral stooges are
arrested.
• Limited costs for considerable gains.
•A simple methodology, exploiting two fundamental factors: human
weakness (such as naivety) and technical vulnerabilities (such as flaws
open to exploits)
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