Chapter 12 focused on financially related online crimes. This chapter focuses on crimes against individuals, organizations and society more generally. Such crimes – including cyberharassment and cyberattacks – are often motivated by hate. New legislation has been developed in the UK and many other countries to combat these crimes, but the psychological harm experienced by victims is only recently being better understood. Victims of these crimes can experience incredibly detrimental effects. In addition, for some, the fear of becoming a victim of these crimes can be debilitating. Although these crimes can and often do take place in the physical world, this chapter focuses predominately on their online equivalents. Moreover, we will touch upon the controversies over employing surveillance as a method to detect and prevent these crimes.

13.1 ONLINE HARASSMENT AND STALKING

When Newark optometrist David Matusiewicz and his former wife Christine Belford divorced in 2006 after having three children, their custody dispute seemed pretty typical.

Today their story is strewn with charges and counter charges, lies, kidnapping, spying, a hacked Facebook account, vitriolic postings on social media, and the murders of Belford and her friend Laura ‘Beth’ Mulford, both gunned down by David’s father, Thomas Matusiewicz, in the New Castle County Courthouse lobby while walking into a child support hearing in 2013.

David Matusiewicz, his sister Amy Gonzalez and his mother Lenore Matusiewicz are the first defendants in America charged with cyberstalking resulting in death – a crime that, if jurors find was connected to Belford’s death, could lead to life in prison. (Reyes & Spencer, 2015)

Harassment is a term typically used in a legal sense to refer to behaviours that are considered to be threatening or disturbing. Making unwanted and persistent sexual advances in the workplace is an example of sexual harassment. Electronic communication can be used to harass both in similar and new ways to physical harassment. Cyberharassment might occur as a consequence of a romantic relationship gone wrong, or from unwanted romantic and/or sexual attention. It can occur within the workplace or between organizations. As with the offline world, various forms of harassment take place online, including but not limited to sexual and racial harassment. Barak (2005) points out three types of sexual harassment that can take place in cyberspace: gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. In addition to the forms of sexual harassment that Barak (2005) discusses, individuals might cyberharass by gaining access to an individual’s computer, monitoring individuals’ keystrokes, sending viruses or destroying an individual’s reputation.

Researchers have noted that cyberharassment is also evident in online spaces where alternative physical identities are adopted, such as Second Life and other virtual worlds (Behm‐Morawitz & Schipper, 2015). In Behm‐Morawitz and Schipper’s research, cyberharassment was operationalized as ‘computer‐mediated obscene comments, sexual harassment, and generally harassing behaviors aimed at debasing and/or driving out a virtual world user’. These authors created a questionnaire that was answered by 216 Second Life users, providing information about their avatars’ appearance and virtual world experiences. Behm‐Morawitz and Schipper found that cyberharassment was fairly common in Second Life, with about two thirds of their sample reporting some experience of cyberharassment. Women were significantly more likely to report feeling cyberharassed compared to men, and this was, in the main, due to avatar sexualization.

Stalking is understood to be a more severe form of harassment, although often the academic literature mixes up the terms (most likely this is because there is no agreed‐upon definition among scholars). From a legal perspective, stalking is a relatively new crime that was not, in fact, recognized as an illegal behaviour until the 1990s. For example, in 1990, California saw the first law passed that specifically made stalking a crime. This was in response to the stalking and eventual murder of the actor Rebecca Schaeffer. Although this is a relatively new crime, researchers note that this type of activity dates back to antiquity, and that obsessive pursuit of another for the purposes of revenge has long been evident in literature (Spitzberg, 2002).

As highlighted in the extract at the start of this section, the Internet has afforded new opportunities to stalk individuals and organizations. Data garnered from online sources can be used to locate a person in the physical world in order to stalk them; however, individuals might be stalked solely online – which can cause harm of equal, or in some cases greater, severity compared with physical stalking. In an attempt to operationalize the term, McGrath and Casey (2002) have argued that:

Stalking is the repeated uninvited monitoring and/or intrusion into the life and activities of a victim that is usually, but not always, undertaken for the purpose of frightening or intimidating the victim or those around the victim … Cyberstalking is merely stalking that uses the Internet for information gathering, monitoring, and/or victim contact. (p. 88–89)

Bocij’s (2004) definition of cyberstalking is more comprehensive, and includes groups and organizations as well as individuals:

[Cyberstalking is] a group of behaviors in which an individual, group of individuals, or organization uses information and communications technology to harasses another individual, group of individuals, or organization. Such behaviors may include, but are not limited to, the transmission of threats and false accusations, identity theft, damage to data or equipment, computer monitoring, solicitation of minors for sexual purposes, and any form of aggression. Harassment is defined as a course of actions that a reasonable person, in possession of the same information, would think causes another reasonable person to suffer emotional distress. (p. 14)

Cyberstalking, of course, does not necessarily remain online. Cyberstalking behaviour can potentially be initiated online but progress to offline methods of stalking, including all traditional offline stalking behaviours, such as use of the phone, following the target, sending letters and so forth. It can also take place in conjunction with traditional stalking behaviours. In addition, the potential victim might simply be identified online and then stalked offline.

13.2 CYBERSTALKING AND THE LAW

Some legislation on stalking has been rewritten to include cyberstalking. For example, in South Australia the legislation defines cyberstalking as:

Where stalkers take advantage of information technology either to cause physical or mental harm to the victim, or to cause the victim to feel serious apprehension or fear. Cyberstalking occurs when a person on at least two separate occasions with an intent to cause serious harm, uses the Internet or some other form of electronic communication to publish or transmit offensive material, or communicates with the person, or to others about that person in a manner that could reasonably be expected to arouse apprehension or fear. (SA Crimes Act 1990)

In a US Attorney General (1999) report, cyberstalking was defined as ‘the use of the Internet, e‐mail, or other electronic communications devices to stalk another person’. Interestingly, the England and Wales Protection from Harassment Act 1997 includes neither cyberstalking nor, specifically, stalking in its definition of harassing behaviour. Instead, it

rules that a person must not pursue a course of conduct which amounts to the harassment of another person. No intent is required: instead the ‘reasonable person’ test is used, qualified in the Act by the words ‘in possession of the same information’. The offence of causing harassment is unusual in that it is not always necessary to prove that a person actually knew the conduct amounted to harassment. The mental element in harassment is established on proof that the suspect knew or ought to have known that the conduct amounted to harassment (section1(1)). Its effects upon the victim determine whether a course of conduct amounts to ‘harassment’. The advantage to this is that any persistent, unwanted behaviour can amount to harassment – permitting police to intervene before behaviour escalates to violence. (Metropolitan Police Service, 1997)

13.3 PSYCHOLOGICALLY PROFILING CRIMINALS AND VICTIMS

Given the dearth of research available on cyberstalking, it is difficult to conclude whether the Internet has provided another space and means for stalkers to harass their victims or whether cyberstalking is a distinct social problem. Theoretically, given that research (already discussed in this book) has found that individuals can feel more disinhibited in some spaces online, which consequently promotes greater risk‐taking and asocial behaviour, it might be reasonable to predict that some people who would never have participated in traditional stalking might engage in cyberstalking behaviours. Some studies, however, have attempted to distinguish both the perpetrators and victims of stalking compared with those of cyberstalking.

There is some literature available on the profile of a person who is more likely to stalk as well as on those who cyberstalk. Fisher, Cullen and Turner (2002) contend that it is easier to collect data on individuals who engage in this criminal behaviour compared with other types of crimes given there is a high rate of self‐identified stalkers (although there is potential bias between those who openly admit the behaviour and those who engage in the behaviour but deny their engagement). The research on offline stalking finds that stalkers are more likely to be men who experienced traumatic childhoods, are insecurely attached and have personality problems (Dye & Davis, 2003; Dutton & Winstead, 2006; Spitzberg & Cupach, 2003; Spitzberg & Veksler, 2007). Drug and alcohol problems are more common in violent stalkers (Rosenfeld, 2004). With regard to cyberstalking, Menard and Pincus (2012) found that stalkers and cyberstalkers were more likely to experience childhood sexual maltreatment than nonstalkers. They also found that, for men, narcissistic vulnerability and its interaction with sexual abuse predicted both stalking and cyberstalking behaviours and, for women, insecure attachment and alcohol expectancies predicted stalking and cyberstalking behaviours. Alexy, Burgess, Baker and Smoyak (2005) found that cyberstalkers were more likely to threaten to hurt themselves than overt stalkers.

It has been found that women are more likely to be the victims of stalking than men (Basile, Swahn, Chen & Saltzman, 2006). In contrast, research on cyberstalking has found that victims are more likely to be men (Alexy et al., 2005). More research with representative samples, however, is needed to confirm this difference. Victims of stalking experiences changes in their social and employment spheres as a consequences of being stalked, whereas victims of cyberstalking are more likely to experience a loss of family and friends (Sheridan & Grant, 2007). Notably, Sheridan and Grant found that psychological, social and financial variables did not significantly differ for victims of stalking compared with cyberstalked victims.

13.4 HATE CRIMES

Hate crimes are broadly understood to be criminal actions motivated by negative attitudes of culturally delimited groups of people (Brax & Munthe, 2015). Some cyberharassment, cyberstalking and even terrorism crimes can also be understood as hate crimes. Hate crimes, however, are difficult to operationalize. As Brax and Munthe point out:

In hate crime debates, we thus find different views on what, more precisely, makes a crime into a hate crime. This is no mere verbal matter but has an impact on what concrete offenses are thought to be suitable targets of legal and policy measures. Such conceptual differences exist between countries, between authorities within single countries, and between different sectors of public policy. Conceptual differences also exist between and within academic disciplines addressing hate crime as a research topic. (p. 1688)

As with cyberharassment, the criminals might act out their hate crimes on the Internet or they might use the Internet to find out information about someone in order to cause them harm offline. The research in psychology on hate crimes, in particular those that involve the Internet, is fairly scant. This is perhaps because these crimes are not clearly defined and overlap with other more clearly defined crimes. Following is an example of a hate crime that took place in the UK:

It was perhaps, therefore, dispiritingly inevitable that Mumsnet – ‘a largely female space’ – would be attacked too. As its popularity grew so did the insults, and it came to be targeted by what Roberts [the owner of Mumsnet], 48, describes as ‘all kinds of weird protests’ over the years – including, she says, the posting of underpants to the staff by campaign group Fathers 4 Justice. Twitter has meanwhile been awash with comments of the ‘get back to the kitchen sink, know your place’ variety.

Then, one night in August [2015], the insults and assaults escalated in a way Roberts could never have predicted. The police received an anonymous phone call from someone reporting she had been murdered and her four children taken hostage by a gunman. Eight police officers were duly scrambled in the middle of the night and dispatched to her London home, five armed with machine guns, accompanied by police dogs.

The family was in fact away on holiday, and all were safe. Only their 21‐year‐old Spanish au pair was at home to face the commotion.

I was what is known as a swatting attack – the false report of a crime that brings a swat team of officers to the victim’s door. A phenomenon seen in the US, this was thought to be the first incident of its kind in Britain.

Around the same time, messages threatening Mumsnet appeared online and a denial of service hacking attack, apparently by a group calling itself @DadSecurity, where servers are flooded with data, temporarily brought the site down. Users’ details were scammed in a phishing exercise and two Mumsnet members who were vocal about the attack on Twitter were also swatted.

The incident hit Roberts hard. ‘It was incredibly stressful and for a period I was waking up pretty much every night thinking there was an armed gunman in my house – irrationally, because obviously I knew it was a hoax, but it was a very anxious time,’ she says. ‘I felt incredibly responsible for the welfare of our users and employees.’ (Silverman, 2015)

Far‐right groups, also known as right‐wing extremist groups, are clearly evident online. The Ku Klux Klan, Islamist extremist groups, the British National Party and National Action (UK) are but a few examples of such groups that have a Web presence – often set up to recruit new members. Hale (2012) has examined how these types of groups use online media to attract young people. In his paper, he points out that being able to quickly download hate materials facilitates recruitment, given that it helps users to feel safe and less at risk of being caught out and having unwanted attention directed towards them. Hale also notes that these groups attempt to recruit members by trawling through posts on online chat forums, and they track website user demographics in order to locate potential members by sending them training manuals and propaganda. Hale believes that custom‐made SNSs, such as Stormfront, are useful recruitment tools, given they not only post information and messages but also encourage interaction with their members, thereby developing strong communities. Although Hale’s presents some important points for researchers to consider regarding recruitment for hate groups, much more research is needed in order to find more effective ways to detect and deter these groups (see Chapter 7 for a more detailed discussion of online radicalization).

13.5 CYBERWARFARE

Hackers breaking into official U.S. networks are not just using Chinese systems as a launch pad, but are based in China, sources tell TIME. Their story: Sometime on November 1st, 2004, hackers sat down at computers in southern China and set off once again on their daily hunt for U.S. secrets. Since 2003 the group had been conducting wide‐ranging assaults on U.S. government targets to steal sensitive information, part of a massive cyberespionage ring that U.S. investigators have codenamed Titan Rain. On this particular night, the hackers’ quarry was military data, and they were armed with a new weapon to reach out across cyberspace and get it.

This was a scanner program that ‘primed the pump,’ according to a former government network analyst who has helped track Titan Rain, by searching vast military networks for single computers with vulnerabilities that the attackers could exploit later. As with many of their tools, this was a simple program, but one that had been cleverly modified to fit their needs, and then used with ruthless efficiency against a vast array of U.S. networks. After performing the scans, the source says, it’s a virtual certainty that the attackers returned within a day or two and, as they had on dozens of military networks, broke into the computers to steal away as much data as possible without being detected. (Thornburgh, 2005)

Cyberwarfare essentially consists of actions carried out by a nation state to penetrate another nation’s networks for the purposes of causing harm, such as damage or disruption. The above extract is an example of a well‐known cyberattack that took place in 2004, referred to as ‘Titan Rain’. The harm can range from causing an effect on the national infrastructure to financial harm or theft, any of which can lead to physical harm.

The rules of war have changed over time as new technologies have been developed; however, new inventions and technologies have meant that we have had to rewrite the rules of war at an ever increasing pace (Singer, 2009). The international community, however, has yet to codify and sanction a body of norms to govern state action in cyberspace (Beidleman, 2009). Scholars, such as Singer, have asked why questions around ethics and technology are so difficult, especially in the realm of war. He quotes from a speech given by General Omar Bradley in November 1948: ‘The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living’ (cited in Singer, 2010, p. 300). An important point made by Singer is that there is a disconnection between the social sciences, humanities and physical sciences, whereby many new technologies that might be used in warfare are developed without any consideration of ethical issues. As touched upon throughout this book, interdisciplinary research can provide richer findings and potential solutions to problems. Cyberwarfare is a good example of an area where experts from a variety of disciplines need to join together to find the best solutions.

Cyberwarfare has a number of features that set it apart from the use of traditional weapons: it is often difficult to determine the source of cyberattacks, creating an attribution problem, and many cyberattacks are not directly lethal and will not result in permanent damage to physical objects (Dipert, 2010). Moreover, engaging in an act of cyberwarfare is arguably a different psychological experience from engaging in physical warfare.

Cyber‐technology has also changed the nature of war. It has been argued, for instance, that the use of drones in war makes killing easy, given the distance the operator is from the target, suggesting that the more physical distance there is between the killer and their target, the more moral distance is created. A shorter distance between the target and the attacker creates emotional and empathic obstacles to killing (Coeckelbergh, 2013).

As discussed in several of the chapters in this book (see especially Chapter 3), psychologists have noted that in cyberspace there is a disinhibition effect. As a reminder, Suler (2004) has described this effect as a double‐edged sword. Whereas some people reveal secret emotions, fears and wishes or show unusual acts of kindness and generosity, which Suler refers to as ‘benign disinhibition’, at other times people are ruder, more critical, angrier or more threatening than they typically are face to face. This Suler calls ‘toxic disinhibition’. Cyberharassment, described earlier in this chapter, is an example of this type of toxic disinhibition. The disinhibition effect has been used to explain why some cybercriminals carry out their crimes. It can decrease the likelihood of feeling responsibility for committing a crime as well as of feeling negative emotions, such as shame (as there is no perceived audience to witness the crime) (Guitton, 2012). However, it might be equally important to consider the disinhibition effect with regard to how intelligence and government respond to a cyberattack or when they might themselves decide to initiate an attack. They might feel less inclined to retaliate, or retaliate with less harm, if they were confronted with the enemy in the physical world, for instance.

The ethics regarding the use of drones has been questioned by a number of scholars. They have asked whether physical distance during war has led individuals to make decisions to harm that they would not have made if the enemy were in closer proximity. Coeckelbergh (2013) writes: ‘although it may be true that remote fighting implies a less embodied, social and engaged way of being‐in‐the‐world (to use Heidegger’s term), drone pilots are still embodied, social, meaning‐giving beings, and also experience their fighting and killing in an embodied way’ (p. 94). According to Coeckelbergh, the more practical empirical question is to learn more about what embodied experience these pilots experience. Moreover, he contends that these pilots need to do close‐up surveillance of their targets – often for long periods of time – meaning they do see the ‘faces’ of their targets and might spend time constructing narratives about their targets’ lives, making the moral distance closer rather than further away and potentially making killing more difficult. Coeckelbergh has focused on drones and surveillance methods that allow the person to see (up close) their target; however, this is not necessarily the case for all methods of attack/defence in cyberwarfare (e.g., denial‐of‐service attacks, where the person or group of people is likely to remain anonymous). It might be interesting to learn how disembodied analysts and other actors in war feel when monitoring or planning an attack, or engaging in an attack on cybercriminals.

13.6 SURVEILLANCE AND MONITORING

Given the volume of crimes that take place online, the utility of the Internet in enabling offline crimes and the harms these crimes might cause, governments believe strong and effective measures are needed to prevent and detect these crimes as well as to catch the criminals behind them. One measure has been the surveillance and monitoring of Internet data. One of the problems with surveillance, however, is that, although it might be employed to prevent and detect criminal behaviour, the surveillance will undoubtedly lead to the monitoring of innocent people’s personal lives. As a consequence, there have been many debates (both nationally and internationally) over how much monitoring is ethical and socially acceptable and who should be privy to this intelligence.

Concerns about surveillance have increased after Edward Snowden leaked the surveillance practices of governments in the US and other countries. This leak has led governments to consider whether transparency is needed regarding surveillance and whether legislation needs to be reworked. The ‘snooper’s charter’ (the Draft Communications Data Bill) in the UK is an example of how governments have reconsidered their positions on surveillance. However, this new charter has caused much upset:

I never thought I’d say it, but George Orwell lacked vision. The spies have gone further than he could have imagined, creating in secret and without democratic authorisation the ultimate panopticon. Now they hope the British public will make it legitimate.

This bill is characterized by a clear anti‐democratic attitude. Those in power are deemed to be good, and are therefore given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Conduct is lawful for all purposes if …’ and ‘A person (whether or not the person so authorised or required) is not to be subject to any civil liability in respect of conduct that …’: these are sections granting immunity to the spies and cops.

The spies’ surveillance activities are also exempt from legal due process. No questions can be asked that might indicate in any legal proceeding that surveillance or interception has occurred. This is to ensure the general public never learn how real people are affected by surveillance. The cost of this exemption is great. It means British prosecutors can’t prosecute terrorists on the best evidence available – the intercepts – which are a key part of any prosecution in serious crime cases worldwide.

Those without power – eg citizens (or the more accurately named subjects) – are potentially bad, and therefore must be watched and monitored closely and constantly. The safeguards mentioned in the bill are there to benefit the state not the citizen. The criminal sanctions aren’t so much to stop spies or police abusing their powers, but rather to silence critics or potential whistleblowers. That’s clear because there is no public interest exemption in the sweeping gagging orders littered throughout the bill. The safeguards for keeping secure the massive troves of personal data aren’t there so much to protect the public but to stop anyone finding out exactly how big or invasive these troves are or how they were acquired. Again, we know this because there is no public interest exemption.

While the concerns of the state dominate, those of the citizen are nowhere to be seen. There is almost no mention in the bill of the privacy and democratic costs of mass surveillance, nor of seriously holding the state to account for the use and abuse of its sweeping powers. (Brooke, 2015)

There are a number of issues that need to be considered regarding individuals’ online privacy. Sparck‐Jones (2003) labelled a number of specific properties of the information collected that have consequences for privacy:

• Permanence: Once recorded, information rarely disappears. As such, fine‐grained, searchable, persistent data exists on individuals and there are sophisticated, cheap data‐mining devices that can also be used to analyse this information.
• Volume: The ease with which information is now recorded using technology results in huge datasets. Furthermore, storage is cheap, so large volumes of information can exist indefinitely.
• Invisibility: All information collected seems to exist within an opaque system and so any information collected may not be ‘visible’ to the person to whom it relates. Even if information collected is available to a person, that person may not be able to interpret it due to the use of incomprehensible coding.
• Neutrality: The ease with which information can be collected means that any qualifying information may be lost. Thus, information may be absorbed regardless of its metadata; that is, there are no distinctions between intimate, sensitive information and nonsensitive information.
• Accessibility: There are a number of tools for accessing information, meaning that any information collected may be read by any number of people. The ease with which information can be copied, transferred, integrated and multiplied electronically further increases this accessibility.
• Assembly: There are many effective tools for searching for, assembling and reorganizing information from many quite separate sources.
• Remoteness: Information collected is usually both physically and logically remote from the users to whom it refers. However, this information can be accessed and used by people whom the user does not know.

As Whitty and Joinson (2009) have argued, each of the above features affects privacy uniquely and in combination with other threats. Although massive data collection and storage are possible in many environments, the very structure of the Internet and its additional feature of connectivity further exacerbate the online privacy problem. The Internet allows for interactive two‐way communication and is woven into people’s lives in a more intimate way than some other media, as it connects people with places and people with people. Accordingly, it poses unique threats to information privacy.

One of the more recent issues regarding online privacy is how ‘Big Data’ can be recombined to provide insights about a person that the user might not be aware of and/or might never have guessed could be made using their data. Organizations, for example, have used Big Data to predict pregnancy, and, although this might not be an objective of government surveillance, this example does demonstrate that personal data might well be used in ways that the public did not imagine. This story is summed up in an extract below:

As the marketers explained to Pole – and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop – new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target – cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six‐month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments – the moment, really – is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.

‘We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,’ Pole told me. ‘As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.’ …

Andrew Pole[’s] … assignment was to analyze all the cue‐routine‐reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways …

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer …

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a ‘pregnancy prediction’ score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. (Duhigg, 2012)

The use of surveillance to prevent and detect cybercrimes, even ones as serious as terrorism, will be an ongoing debate, and one that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Psychology can contribute by furthering our knowledge on identity in the physical and cyber realms, and on citizens’ attitudes towards how their personal identity is watched and used by others.

13.7 CONCLUSIONS

This chapter focused on a number of cyberenabled crimes, all of which can potentially cause great harm to an individual, organization and/or society. To some extent, legislation has been reworked to recognize these crimes, but often this legislation is inconsistent across nations (making it especially difficult to deal with crimes that cross borders). As scholars, we are also yet to clearly operationalize these crimes (hate crime is a good example of a crime that has not been clearly defined). In the quest to prevent and detect these crimes, governments have reworked legislation on surveillance methods; however, these methods have met strong opposition from the public, given they potentially threaten individuals’ privacy. In Chapter 14 we consider another form of crime that has become a bigger problem since the advent of the Internet: child pornography and paedophilia.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Where should one draw the line between cyberstalking and watching someone’s activities online?
2. What are some of the current limitations with regard to research on cyberharassment and cyberstalking?
3. In your view, what strategies might be implemented to prevent hate crimes?
4. What contributions do you see psychologists making to the area of cyberwarfare (e.g., with regard to prevention and decisions on retaliation, deterrence and detection)?
5. Are drones ethical weapons and/or means of surveillance? Why, or why not?
6. What is your view on the use of surveillance of online personal data to detect and prevent crimes? How might this best be conducted and who ought to be privy (if anyone) to individuals’ personal data?

SUGGESTED READINGS

1. Barak, A. (2005). Sexual harassment on the Internet. Social Science Computer Review, 23(1), 77–92.
2. Behm‐Morawitz, E. & Schipper, S. (2015). Sexing the avatar: Gender, sexualisation and cyber‐harassment in a virtual world. Journal of Media Psychology. doi: 10.1027/1864–1105/a000152
3. Guitton, C. (2012). Criminals and cyber attacks: The missing link between attribution and deterrence. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 6(2), 1030–1043.
4. Hale, W. C. (2012). Extremism on the World Wide Web: A research review. Criminal Justice Studies, 25(4), 343–356.
5. Sheridan, L. P. & Grant, T. (2007). Is cyberstalking different? Psychology, Crime & Law, 13(6), 1477–2744.
6. Singer, P. W. (2009). Military robots and the laws of war. New Atlantis, 23(winter), 28–47.
7. Sparck‐Jones, K. (2003). Privacy: What’s different now? Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 28, 287–292.