Digital Crime and Terrorism



Digital Crime and Terrorism

Introduction

There are a number of theories in criminology, and many of them have been frequently cited, tested, criticized, and even integrated. New perspectives therefore have been brought into outmoded theories. For example, modern biological theory no longer uses the term born criminals, and labeling theory starts to take informal sanctions into account. However, none of these theories, even with different perspectives, have undoubtedly provided a complete explanation for criminality, mainly because when testing these theories, the unexplained variation seems to persistently exceed the explained portion. The explained variation found in empirical studies mostly ranges from 5 percent to 25 percent, which means in the attempt to explain crime. Current theoretical models did not seem to apply to every case. This suggests the conventional approach to explaining crime fails to touch the core of criminality that is undoubtedly shared by all criminals. Although the criminal factors derived from existing theories are sensible, they may not be applicable to everyone. Moreover, these theories were created with conventional crime or delinquency in mind, but they typically fail to account for all criminalities represented by conventional crimes, let alone the criminality of some newly defined crimes, such as digital crime and digital terrorism. Therefore, all issues related to digital crime and terrorism will be discussed in detail.

Background of Digital Crime

Digital crime refers to a diverse range of illegal activities that take place in the unique electronic environment, cyberspace. Its crime scene (i.e., cyberspace) makes it a special crime, because, in the virtual settings, many things do not seem to operate in the same way as in the real world. For instance, stealing property from the Internet is not quite the same as sealing a candy bar from a convenient store or stealing a car in the parking lot. By the same token, police patrol is certainly also not in the same form in cyberspace. Given this cyber nature, it is unsure whether existing theories can adequately apply to cybercrime if people have not established that cybercrime represents the same criminality as the one represented by conservative crime. Further, perhaps conservative crime itself represents more than one criminality, and so does cybercrime (Bagchi, 2006, 75).

In addition, offenders often get classified based on the offense they committed, which essentially means if you do the same thing, you are of the same kind. For instance, when studying drug offenders, the traditional approach to classifying crime and criminals does not seem to distinguish two convicted drug offenders when one of them is prone to violence but the other is not. The traditional approach tends to focus on salient behaviors and fail to address the underlying mindset that leads to those behaviors and possibly future behaviors. The current project has no intention to refute the traditional approach, but, meant to propose a less conventional, if not unconventional, approach. The focus here has shifted away from criminal behavior to the criminal mindset. This is not a psychological model that is intended to ...