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“Globalization
is an umbrella term for a complex series of economic, social,
technological and political changes that have been identified
since the 1980s. These changes and processes are seen as
increasing interdependence and interaction between people and
companies in disparate locations “(Wikopedia, 2006).
Originally referred to as an economic phenomena, the term
globalization has grown in scope as technology and more
specifically, the Internet, has made access to the world at
large faster and for the most part unproblematic. Along
with the positive aspects of globalization, Internet crime
has also grown and is a true reflection of the complexity of
globalization.
The advent of the Internet has
redefined the scope of crime. What was once the province of
local authorities within a local physical sphere has now
become a phenomenon that crosses international borders. The
global network has facilitated the growth of global computer
crime as crackers, spammers, and child pornographers, invade
cyberspace. It is often motivated by economics, and it has
become a social problem for those who use the Internet
regularly. The interactions made possible on this shared
media create the possibilities of fraud, theft, and
exploitation, that law enforcement worldwide has trouble
containing.
This paper will examine
globalization from the perspective of cyber crime and will
investigate the jurisdictional issues associated with
networks of criminals who work on a global scale. It will
focus on three main areas: cracking, spamming and child
pornography examining fraud, theft, and exploitation as well
as the economic motivation behind these crimes. The paper
will also address the problem of responsibility, and the
effect of global crime on the Internet as an open and shared
media.
A computer programmer knows that
global variables, those seen by everything else in the
program cause problems. If the programmer is careless, the
variables can inadvertently be modified and the output of the
program corrupted. Finding these programming errors is
difficult because when a variable is visible to the entire
program, the traceability of errors becomes long and tedious.
That is why programming students are taught to embrace local
variables that are declared within the scope of a module and
visible locally. Modifications to that variable can only be
made within the location of the module. How does this
pertain to the topic at hand? The Internet is a totally
global space where the defacto rule is global visibility.
Only stand-alone computers that are unconnected enjoy the
privilege of security (unless someone steals the computer),
reserved for the “local variable”. Computer users with
Internet access have had to implement firewalls, security
systems and anti-virus software to attempt to restrict
visibility to what is on their machines and networks.
Restricting visibility is an attempt to ensure privacy of
data, autonomy and control over private information and
programs.
If we analyze social trends in the
six years, we can see that there has been a rise of computer
crime related to the globalization of the Internet. Crimes
such as cracking, spamming, and child pornography have become
international in scope crossing invisible national borders
that do not exist over the Internet. Like errors with global
variables, these crimes are difficult to trace. Even if the
criminals are apprehended, the jurisdiction of punishment is
often problematic and the laws are different from country to
country. Two ethical questions that present themselves are,
first, “How can users, ISP’s and governments respond
adequately to the issue of global crime”? And secondly,
“What is the effect of globalized crime on the Internet as a
shared, open media?” Part One of this paper will examine
globalization, Part Two will address three of the most
prevalent crimes: cracking, spamming and child pornography in
light of the complexity of globalization and Part Three will
examine local solutions to these global problems.
This is an outline of the proposed paper
with a brief introduction to the sections:
2. 1 Global Internet crime: Cracking,
Spamming, and Child Pornography
Each
subsection will examine specific instances of the crime, the
economic implications and motivations
.
2.1.1 Cracking
Cracking is a name given to a malicious or criminal
hacker. Richard Stallman, who attempted to distinguish
crackers from the hackers that populated the Free Software
movement, first coined this usage. Cracking has gone global
and in the best sense of project management, teams of
crackers have been created with each member contributing his
or her strengths to commit the crime. This is what Piore
(2005) refers to as “perhaps the fastest growing criminal
enterprise of the 21st century”.
2. 1.2 Spamming
Spamming is the use of email systems to send messages to
recipients that are both unsolicited and unwanted. The
prevalence of unsolicited spam has grown to monstrous
proportions within the last few years, bypassing filtering
programs and security set up to prevent its arrival. Spambots
crawl through the web, collecting Internet email addresses
for mailing lists. In the first half of 2005, the number of
bot infected systems in China grew 140% (Yeo, 2005). Seoul,
Beijing and Taipei were listed among the 10 top cities with
infected systems (Yeo, 2005).
2.1.3 Child Pornography
Child pornography is the exploitation of children for sexual
purposes. It is also known colloquially as “kiddie porn. As
far back as 1999, meetings between the European Union and the
United States have been devoted to the issue of curtailing
international child pornography rings on the Internet (Akdeniz,
2003). In addition web sites such as
www.antichildporn.org provide information and help in the
global fight against child pornography. How has child
pornography globalized? The rest of this section addresses
this issue.
3. Global Problems Local Responsibility
The global nature of these three computer crimes has
necessitated some creative solutions from authorities around
the world. Although cooperative law enforcement groups
around the globe may execute oversight and virtual
identification of criminals on the Internet, the
responsibility of apprehension and shutting down the sites
usually falls to local authorities.
4. Conclusion
Keywords: globalization, spamming,
cracking, child pornography, autonomy
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