Policing Hacking: Vulnerability, Securitisation, and Criminalisation

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

This panel will empirically and conceptually reflect on contemporary examples of cyber-dependent crime and digital deviance, the people who commit it, and emerging police and private industry activity directed at its disruption. Over 40 years, the capacity of police globally to pursue cyber-dependent offenders has been limited in several well-established ways (i.e. reach, scale, technology, training). In the Western anglophone world, research illustrates that public police organizations have targeted vulnerable groups such as young people, often ‘gamers’, deemed ‘at-risk’ of cyber-offending in both reactive and preventive ways. This panel will consider the nature and implications of how (young) people are policed in the context of cybercrime and digital deviance. It will interrogate the theoretical foundations through which we view preventive and reactive interventions, the securitization and criminalization of often creative and exploratory hacking practices, and the general neglect of larger corporate harms. The panel will reflect on the combined implications of their work for private and public sector responses to cybercrime, the cyber-security industry, democratic policing, and youth justice more generally.

Sub Unit

• Area III. Types of Offending / 19. Identity Theft and Cyber Crime

Individual Presentations

• XP Points to Level Up: Gaming as a ‘Gateway’ Activity to Cybercrime - Yanna Papadodimitraki, University of Cambridge

• Online Gaming Forums and Discourse of Hacking - Yi Ting Chua, University of Tulsa

• Hacking Desistance: Exploring Police Practices and Social Control Strategies in Cases of Cyber-dependent Crime - Sarah Anderson, Edinburgh Napier University; Shane Horgan, Edinburgh Napier University; Ben Collier, University of Edinburgh

• How Dark is the Dark Web? Examinations on the Purpose of Tor and Dark Web Usage - Emily K Smith, University of Alabama

Discussant

• Kevin Steinmetz, Kansas State University

Organized by a Division or external group?

Cybercrime