The overlap between criminal justice and cybercrime is massive as the role of cybercrime has become a major issue in the world of law enforcement. The legal definitions of cybercrime would be “the use of computer technology to commit crime; to engage in activity that threatens a society’s ability to maintain internal order” (Brenner, 2007, p. 386), which is very broad. When viewing crime as traditional crime, we look at whether the behavior was illegal (Brenner, 2007), harmful (Friedrichs, 2009), or deviant (Inderbitzin, Bates & Gainey, 2016). If we define cybercrime as “harmful behavior”, we would focus on the harm that arises from cyber offences, for example, in 2017 data from the Internet Crime Complaint Center showed $4.63 billion in total losses to Internet crime in 2016, with the FBI showing a total of 465 million in losses to robberies that year. Another perspective is looking at cybercrime as behavior as a deviant construct. From this stance, cybercrime is a behavior that breaks societal norms, whether illegal or not. For example, someone making profane and mean comments on a message board, while not illegal, could be viewed as “breaking societal norms and standards”. Another great point from the reading was internet addiction not being criminal but may be seen as deviant. We also have white-collar cybercrime. White-collar crime is a “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”, and some argue that certain cybercrimes are white-collar offenses, such as an employee putting a trojan in a work network, or maliciously plugging an infected drive into a work computer, the list goes on. Effectively any crime committed with a computer can be construed as a cybercrime, including but not limited to hacking, fraud, conspiracy, cyberstalking, identity theft, trafficking, cyber attakcs, money laundering, wiretapping, and theft.
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