High Tech Crime

            High tech crime has become so much of a hot topic in the world today.  Crime using electronic devices is prevalent everywhere, ranging from the music industry to the banking industry and every system which we have come to depend on in our daily lives. 

            In November of 2000, the rock band, Metallica sued the peer to peer sharing company Napster for allegedly encouraging the fans of the group to illegally download (or pirate) their music from the napster.com website.  Metallica alleged that Napster was guilty of copyright infringement and racketeering by allowing this.

            As defined by thefreedictionary.com (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/piracy, 2008), piracy is "Apart from its traditional definition, piracy also refers to copyright violations. Committed both in the United States and abroad, this form of piracy includes the unauthorized storage, reproduction, distribution, or sale of intellectual property—for example, music CDs, movie videocassettes, and even fashion designs. The term has been applied, in particular, to the piracy of computer software, which is highly susceptible to theft because of its ease of duplication. Estimates of the cost to copyright holders ranges in the billions of dollars annually. U.S. law protects copyright holders under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C.S. § 109 [1993]), and a 1992 federal law makes software piracy a felony (Pub. L. No. 102-561, 106 Stat. 4233, codified at 18 U.S.C.A. § 2319 [1988 & 1992 Supp.]). Since the 1990s, a number of international treaties and conventions, as well as diplomatic initiatives, have sought to forge greater cooperation among nations to combat such piracy."

            Pretty much all teenagers, in any time period, have committed some form of 'piracy'.  According to the definition above, it looks as if any time someone downloads any type of media, even for personal use, they are committing piracy.

            Most people don't actually think that they are doing anything illegal.   What makes this crime so hard to prosecute is that there is no way of really knowing who is committing it, when they are committing it or where they are committing it.   It is almost next to impossible to catch someone in the act of committing piracy.

            The term 'Cybercrime' seems to fit my own idea of what high-tech crime consists of.  It does not only encompass the use of computers in committing crimes, but also the other high tech devices that are available for public use.  By using this construct to define computer crime, we are adding devices such as iPhones, iPads, iPods, cell phones, tablets as well as the good old personal computer to the list of devices that are readily available for use by anyone with the right knowledge to commit crimes against society.

            By understanding what makes these devices so easy to be manipulated, we can study them and create ways of deterring any person or persons who may be able to access the systems.  We can ultimately place a highly trained computer professional in charge of creating firewalls or backend programs to detect intruders and determine where they have come from or even who they may be.    IP addresses can be traced, GPS systems can be tracked, and even security strips can be tracked. 

            In cases where consulting a trained computer professional is not an option, even the average person, just by studying the device and doing research on it, could figure out how to set up security protocols that would make the device or system "invisible" to intruders.

            In our lives, the newest and biggest threat to our security comes from high tech crimes.  It is because these crimes are so difficult to see, and therefore almost impossible to prosecute, that every facet of our society can be affected.