by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: November 19, 2009

It is known that, whenever there is a new form of human interaction, there will be criminals who will use that form to their advantage. The cyber world is a supermagnet for criminals because of the international playing ground, the ability to create complete and untraceable anonymity, the speed at which crime can be committed and the actors can get away, and the massive amount of crime that can be done by hacking into massive databases or infrastructures.

The most basic definition of cyber crime concerns crime that is committed by using computers and/or computer networks.

There is a problem with that definition. Many electronic products are now computers, and they are used to commit crimes that would have been impossible without the computerization of the device. The newest digital voice recorders are tiny little computers. It is illegal to record without consent in many states and countries. But even when the illegal recording is never uploaded to a larger computer and blasted across a network, technically, a cyber crime has been committed. Digital cameras are little computers. Cell phones are little computers. When a terrorist initiates an explosion from a distance with a cell phone call over a cell phone network a cyber crime, in addition to a host of other crimes, has been committed.

This is an important distinction, because the use of "other" computerized devices and the extensive use of cell phones in many criminal enterprises confuses the issue of whether laws should be constructed under the classification of cyber crime or conventional crime. Investigations involving special cyber crime units, versus conventional crime units, can become quite confused and difficult to staff, organize and fund.

One of the most telling issues in criminal justice is that laws covering an actual criminal activity may have weak conventional sentencing guidelilnes, that is until federal wire and mail fraud is involved, then the criminals are prosecuted under the wire and mail fraud statutes in order to get a much more severe sentence. In the case of whether to prosecute crimes under conventional or cyber crime statutes, there will be much more discussion and argument about criminal classification as conventional or cyber, depending on which level of government is prosecuting, and which law has the stronger penalties.

Another problem with "traditional" cyber crime, which involves a true computer and not a computer as part of another device, is in the international scope of the crime. When the laws, investigatory ability, and budgets of many countries vary widely, there can be points of complete stoppages to the progress of investigation and prosecution, because there may not even be agreement that a crime has been committed, let alone what should be done about it!

Finally, the methods that prevent, investigate, or even define punishable action can be viewed as denial of legal rights, denial of service, or denial of ability to do business. A government's ability to monitor and detect cyber criminal activity on a wide scale can only come at the cost of violating the majority of users rights to privacy and freedom.

Worse, innocent people can be swept up in large, less discriminating efforts to round up cyber criminals, as they may have simply visited a site that was falsely labeled as a common Google search term, but was actually the site of criminal activity. While voluntary reporting, awareness, and improvements to personal, corporate, and site security are the most valuable tools in fighting cyber crime, they are just that: voluntary, and therefore unreliable.

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