6.1 Axes to Pathological Criminals, and Other Unintended Consequences


6.1 Axes to Pathological Criminals, and Other Unintended Consequences

What the Internet is today was never intended or imagined by those who broke its first ground.

In 1969 the US Department of Defense's research arm, ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) began funding what would eventually evolve to become the technological basis for the Internet.[1]

Their intent was to create a mechanism for ensured communication between military installations. It was not their intent to provide for synchronous and asynchronous international person-to-person communication between private individuals, and the beginnings of a pervasive form of social-global connectedness. It was not their intent to create venues for trade and commerce in a digital-international marketplace. Nor was it their intent to place axes in the hands of pathological criminals in the form of robust and efficient tools for stealing information, monitoring individual activity, covert communication, and dispersing illicit material. Regardless, that technology, and every related technology subsequent to its evolution, provides for these things and much more.

The Internet began as an endeavor to help one group within the US Government share information and communicate within its own ranks on a national level. It has evolved into a system that provides virtually any individual with some basic skills and materials the ability to share information and contact anyone else connected to that system on an international level. Without exaggeration, the Internet and its related technologies represent nothing short of historically unparalleled global, trans-social, and trans-economic connectedness. In every sense it is a technological success.

However, history is replete with similar examples of sweet technological success followed by deep but unintended social consequences:

  • The American businessman, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton gin in 1793, which effectively cleaned the seeds from green-seeded inland cotton, bringing economic prosperity to the South and revitalizing the dying slave trade. This added much fuel to the engines which were already driving the United States towards civil war.

  • The American physician, Dr Richard J. Gatling, invented the hand crank operated rapid fire multi-barreled Gatling gun in 1862, which he believed would decrease the number of lives lost in battle through its efficiency. This led the way for numerous generations of multi-barreled guns with increased range and extremely high rates of fire. Such weapons have been employed with efficient yet devastating results against military personnel and civilians in almost every major conflict since. The efficiency of such weapons to discharge projectiles has not been the life saving element that Dr Gatling had hoped, but rather has significantly compounded the lethality of warfare.

  • The American theoretical physicist, Robert J. Oppenheimer, director of the research laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, headed the US Government's Manhattan Project in the mid-1940s with the aim of unlocking the power of the atom, which resulted in the development of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb may have been intended to end World War II and prevent the loss of more soldiers in combat on both sides. However its use against the citizens of Japan in 1945 arguably signaled the official beginning of both the Cold War and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Not to mention the devastation it caused directly, the impact of which is still felt today.

These simple examples do us the service of demonstrating that, historically, no matter what objective a technology is designed to achieve, and no matter what intentions or beliefs impel its initial development, technology is still subordinate to the motives and morality of those who employ it. Technology helps to create more efficient tools. Any tool, no matter how much technology goes into it, is still only an extension of individual motive and intent. Invariably, some individuals will be driven to satisfy criminal motives and intents.

Either through fear or misunderstanding, there are those who believe and argue that technology is to blame for its misuse. This is a misguided endeavor, and one that shifts the responsibility for human action away from human hands:

"It's something I call 'technophobia,'" says Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Virginia. "Cyberpanic is all about the demonization of a new form of technology, where that technology is automatically perceived as a crime or a criminal instrument." (Shamburg 1999)

In the process of demonizing technology, it may be suggested that there are new types of crimes and criminals emerging. This is not necessarily the case. It is more often that computer and Internet technologies merely add a new dimension to existing crime. As Meloy (1998) points out, "The rather mundane reality is that every new technology can serve as a vehicle for criminal behavior." McPherson (2003) discusses the issue as it relates to computer fraud and forensic accounting:

Technology simply enables people to commit fraud on a larger scale.

...

"The computer has just given fraud another dimension."

In relation to computers, forensic accountants look for electronic footprints of people's actions. Previously, people created hard copies - it was easier to shred them and to interrupt an investigator's trail or auditing procedures. Now people try to delete files or keep them on other disks or hard drives.

Computers and the Internet are no different from other technologies adapted by the criminal. With this simple observation in mind we can proceed towards understanding how it is that criminals employ technology in the commission of their crimes.

[1]The development of the Internet is discussed in more detail in Chapter 15.




Digital Evidence and Computer Crime
Digital Evidence and Computer Crime, Second Edition
ISBN: 0121631044
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 279

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