Law enforcement responses to cyberstalking

Cyberstalking

Cyber-Crime in a New Age of Law Enforcement

With the new introduction of the online sphere, law enforcement today faces unique challenges those previous generations could never even imagined. The internet allows the ability to create an online presence that has virtually no relevance to the real world character of the user. People can now create an online presence with the ability to construct a range of pseudonymity that was never before possible (Gyorgy, 2002). Therefore the person that you think you are communicating with may be a different person altogether.

Furthermore, people can set up a range of different personalities and have multiple identities online that they can use for a range of malicious activities. For example, it is possible for an elderly man who has perverted tendencies to portray himself as a young school girl on online chat forums. In these arenas there is seldom any verification process to unsure the users are who they say they are. However, the use of such pseudonymity often leads people to quickly imagine all the negative and dangerous uses of these fake profiles. Although most of these profiles can be harmless, others can be used for ill intent.

The users that use online spaces for crimes are often hard to catch and these crimes can often occur on a massive scale. Target's chief financial officer, John Mulligan, told a congressional committee in February that the company began investigating Dec. 12, when the U.S. Justice Department warned the company about suspicious activity involving payment cards; about 40 million payment card records were stolen from the retailer, along with 70 million other records with customer information such as addresses and telephone numbers (Jayakumar, 2014). The enormity of this type of identity theft makes it incredibly difficult to provide safe access for future users and the opportunities for identity theft based on this attack are virtually endless.

It is not only the private sector that is currently having problems with cybersecurity. WikiLeaks has become of closely watched organization in the last few years because of its release of hundreds of thousands of classified government documents that show everything from diplomatic cables to videos of war crimes being committed. The stated purpose of the organization is to provide more transparency in the world; especially in regards to public officials. In a response to a question posed by Chris Anderson in a TED interview, Julian Assange offered this response when asked how he would justify releasing damaging information about someone's family member (TEDGlobal, 2010):

JA: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. But remember, the people in Baghdad, the people in Iraq, the people in Afghanistan -- they don't need to see the video; they see it every day. So it's not going to change their opinion. It's not going to change their perception. That's what they see every day. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all, and that's our hope.

This type of cybersecurity is hotly contested in regards to its virtue. Some believe that the organization is doing a service to the public while others believe that figures such as Julian Assange should be tried in a court for treason for releasing U.S. secretes.

However, regulating access to the online community is also a cause of concern. In countries like China, the government regulates much of the internet usage. The Chinese people do not have access to popular websites such as Facebook. However, they have a clone of this service with its server that is located in Beijing; a strategy that is referred to as "block and clone" (TEDGlobal, 2012). The Chinese have an incredible firewall that allows there population to be blocked from many international sites although they generally duplicate many services internally so that the citizens have access to similar features yet this still remain under Chinese control. Most people in the West believe that such control goes beyond what is considered freedom of speech.