New Perspectives on Cybercrime

In this chapter, we examine Owen and Owen’s (2015) meta-construct of neuro-agency and developments in neuroscience concerning notions of free will, embodied cognition, neuroplasticity and neuro-ethics in relation to cybercrime. The meta-construct, neuro-agency is employed in Genetic-Social metatheoretical reasoning as an acknowledgement of the neural influence upon human free will. It is contended here that it is timely and essential to acknowledge recent developments in the neuroscience of free will and to abandon the ‘old’ term, ‘agency’. Whilst, a neural influence upon human free will is acknowledged here, it is not argued that free will is an illusion, as has been suggested by the hard-line, determinist work of Eagleman (2011). The suggestion here is that the most convincing model of free will, and the one which has played the most significant role in the development of Owen and Owen’s (ibid) notion of neuro-agency, is the ‘soft compatabilist’ model of free will offered by Dennett (1981), in which a belief in both determinism and free will is not seen as logically inconsistent. In what follows, we firstly examine selected examples from the literature on the subject of the ‘neuroscience of free will’.

Social media can be seen as a democratising force in which everyone can have their say and each person has an opinion which they can voice to the whole world. So when a person encounters something which he or she feels is wrong, or feels that an injustice has been done, then the person can take to the Internet and voice his or her outrage. But what if this went too far and calls of outrage mutated into calls for ‘justice’ outside the law? This is the problem of cyber vigilantism in which the sentiments of the mob sweep across social media. It would appear that the speed of communication has overtaken the ability of some to think objectively.

As the threat of cybercrime increases, the forces which seek to combat them also increase. This chapter seeks to examine how an industry has arisen from the cybercrime threat and what forms of specialist areas they cover. In particular, we will look at the broad categories in which these different threats fall into and discuss how an industry has sprung up to capitalise upon it.

Much of modern social interaction takes place using digital communications, using the Smartphone and tablet devices which have seemingly become ubiquitous to our modern generation. As will all interactions between individuals, not all will be pleasant or tasteful; some may be rude and offensive, possibly even harmful to the person on the receiving end. The fact that this takes place is not unusual, it happens often enough in the ‘offline’ world, but it is scale and reach of such activities which should give us pause for thought. The question we must now ask is ‘what are the unique circumstances which make online social media particularly ripe for incivility?’ and ‘how should we categorise it?’ Also discussed here will be motivations and the theories surrounding the aetiology of this behaviour. This chapter will discuss the motivations of trolling in relation to Nietzsche’s concepts of ‘resentiment’, ‘slave morality’ and ‘nihilism’ and draw upon the concept of ‘causal probability’ in order to shed new light upon this activity.

As the twenty-first century continues its steady march, the Internet has become an important part of daily life for much of the globe. Many of us shop, organise our finances, conduct our working lives, meet our intimate partners and maintain our relationships online. Technology has become increasingly affordable: tablets, smartphones and laptops are enabling more and more people in ever-remote areas to become ‘switched on’. This has brought us to an interesting moment, where the issue of sexualised threats in online public spaces is a concern facing more and more women, yet it is drastically under-theorised. This chapter offers some ways to think through the issue.

The early days of the Internet promised much. Posting online seemed to offer a freedom from expectation and prejudice. In the words of the New Yorker cartoon, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. We believed nobody knew your gender, age or race either. Your beauty or lack of it was of no account, your mind was disembodied, pure spirit, freed from the hidebound judgements of society.

In this chapter, we briefly consider what is meant by virtual and hybrid cybercriminologies (Brown 2003 and 2006), and then move on to codify the new version of Owen’s (2014) Genetic-Social framework, which incorporates several new meta-concepts since the publication of the work of Owen (2014) and Owen and Owen (2015), which include Tim Owen’s concept of Neuro-Agency and Martin Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein and Ontic Truth. We then ‘apply’ some of the meta-concepts, which now incorporate insights from neuroscience (Dennett 1981; Dennett et al. 2007; Moll et al. 2005) and the philosophy of Heidegger (2010) to the study of these recent forms of criminological theorising pertaining to cybercrime. It is contended that virtual and hybrid cybercriminologies should be rejected in favour of concepts of neuro-agency and psychobiography. The former meta-concept reflects the idea that when considering ‘Who is in charge?’, one should keep firmly in mind that human beings (Dasein) are the product of natural selection, a cocktail of the mutuality between genes and environment, and we must acknowledge the neuroscience of free will (agency) and the evolved nature of moral reasoning. The latter meta-concept, psychobiography, refers to the asocial, inherited aspects of the person or disposition. Machinery and cyber technology may simulate a ‘merging’ between the human and the technical, but in the harsh light of a Heideggarian theory of pure surface, no cyborg or machine can ever qualify as Dasein. As Heidegger (2010) made clear, the human being is not an isolated subject removed from the realm of objects but that does not mean that we can ‘merge’ with the non-human, as Brown (2006, 2013) appears to suggest. For Heidegger, being is time, to be a human being is to exist temporally between birth and death. No cyborg or machine can function without being programmed by human neuro-agency, and no cyborg or machine has the cognition to formulate and act upon decisions. It is the human being (Dasein) that can do so, and only the human being has a self capable of being what it is through confronting the reality of death. No cyborg has the capacity to grasp this finitude and ‘become who one is’.

A number of groups have developed on Facebook that address the issue of online scamming. Their aim is to share the online profiles developed by scammers and to provide up-to-date information on how people can protect themselves from scams. These groups are available for anyone to locate on Facebook by typing in a key word search. There are sites that focus on scammers more generally and sites that focus on more niche or specific types of scams. There are sites that are ‘public’ (accessible to anyone), ‘closed’ (you have to be accepted by the moderators to join the site) or private (only accessible to members and not available to view without an invitation). General sites aimed at providing information on how to avoid scamming and information on scammers profiles include ‘imposters’, ‘scammers busted’, we fighting scammers and imposters’ and ‘scammers and hoaxes’. Action Fraud is a national reporting centre where people can report fraud and cybercrime. The centre provides up-to-date information regarding cybercrime and is run by the City of London Police who work alongside the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

The sudden intrusion upon social media of videos depicting atrocity and murder has become more prevalent over the last couple of years, but why is this so? Does this constitute another (although extreme) form of spam? Is there also a social engineering element to this, in that it will attract people’s morbid curiosity and induce outrage, all of which results in computer traffic in the competition for our attention on the Internet?