Relevant Links:
Internet Crime: Introduction
The Internet provides a medium for communication and information sharing unparalleled in the history of this planet. Unfortunately, there is also a darker side to all this technological glitter: Internet Crime. You've probably experienced Internet Crime in one form or another: spam, chain-letters, scams, and viruses being the common nuisances that they are. You might even be committing Internet Crimes consciously or unconsciously yourself: using pirated software or borrowing someone's intellectual property without their consent. "Are these things criminal activities?" you may be asking yourself. And, that is a good question to ask. What constitutes an Internet Crime? Who decides? Who will enforce the laws which will inevitably arise in an attempt to control Internet Crime? The answer to these questions is where the heart of the problem of Internet Crime lies.
There is no standard definition of what constitutes an Internet Crime. In a virtual world in which one can travel half way around the world with one click of a finger, how can we formulate laws and enforce those laws? If you are a citizen of Canada visiting a web site hosted in China, are you bound by the laws of Canada or the laws of China? The laws of China and the laws of Canada are different. If you watch a "pirated" video on a Chinese site, are you breaking the law in Canada? Would anyone even know if you had?
This brings us to another issue: the "statelessness" of the web. I don't mean that the web doesn't have nations, or territories, or states (though I guess a case could be made for this too). The web is stateless in the sense that every request a client makes to a server is treated as a new request. When you visit a web site, your computer, or client, is sending a stream of requests to the server hosting that site. One-by-one requests are made and responded to as if no interactions had previously occurred. Attempts are being made to change this through the use of cookies, spy ware, and hidden scripts which can log how you interact with a web site and store information about you. These attempts may themselves be a form of criminal activity: an invasion of privacy.
In this web site, the major forms Internet Crime can take have been highlighted and expanded upon in the categories you can click on above. Some of the data emerging from my investigation of Internet Crime has surprised me. Some of it has appalled me. All of it has left me with many unanswered questions. If you have any comments, insights, or suggestions about this site or the content of this site, feel free to contact me at the following e-mail address: rjtrad2@uky.edu.
About The Author
General Internet Crime Links:
Cyber
Crime News
Cybercrimes (University of
Dayton)
E-Commerce & the
Internet (FTC)
Roger
Clarke's Internet Crime Prevention
Copyright @ 2002 by Robert J. Trader, University of
Kentucky Graduate Student.
All rights reserved.
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