N O W    A V A I L A B L E

 

  
 
In Technocrime, Stéphane Leman-Langlois has done a masterful job of providing a critical examination of how recent technological innovations have changed both the mechanisms of crime commission — new opportunities, new techniques, new offenders, and new victims — and the mechanisms of crime prevention and control — by police, courts, corrections, and the private sector. After reading the collection of articles in this volume, the reader will find themselves reflecting on a recurring theme in Technocrime: technology is neither the cause of — nor the solution to — the crime problem; but by studying technocrime, we can gain a better understanding of the social — and increasingly technological — construction of crime causation, crime prevention, and crime control. Technocrime is essential reading for anyone interested in the consequences of technology on social interaction and social control.

James M. Byrne, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Massachusetts
 
 

This book is concerned with the concept of "technocrime." The term encompasses crimes committed on or with computers — the standard definition of cybercrime — but it goes well beyond this to convey the idea that technology enables an entirely new way of committing, combating and thinking about criminality, criminals, police, courts, victims and citizens. Technology offers, for example, not only new ways of combating crime, but also new ways to look for, unveil, and label crimes, and new ways to know, watch, prosecute and punish criminals.

Technocrime differs from books concerned more narrowly with cybercrime in taking a broader approach and understanding of the scope of technology's impact on crime and crime control. It uncovers mechanisms by which behaviours become crimes or cease to be called crimes. It identifies a number of corporate, government and individual actors who are instrumental in this construction. And it looks at the beneficiaries of increased surveillance, control and protection as well as the targets of it. Chapters in the book cover specific technologies (e.g. the use of CCTV in various settings; computers, hackers and security experts; photo radar) but have a wider objective to provide a comparative perspective and some broader theoretical foundations for thinking about crime and technology than have existed hitherto.

This is a pioneering book which advances our understanding of the relationship between crime and technology, drawing upon the disciplines of criminology, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, surveillance studies and cultural studies.


Published in English by Willan Publishing. [Amazon.ca]

 
 

Le TECHNOCRIME est l'ensemble des conduites humaines qui sont 1) incriminées et 2) modifiées par l'apport d'une technologie. La société de l'information repose sur une structure technologique de plus en plus poussée, qui touche la plupart des activités des individus. Elle transforme des pratiques qui la précédaient, et en constitue d'autres qui sont sans précédent, dont des crimes.

-Le TECHNOCRIME a un penchant, ou plusieurs penchants : la multitude de pratiques qui visent à le contrôler. Les technologies privées, publiques, policières, administratives, communautaires et individuelles qui servent à surveiller, à interdire, à convaincre, ou à dénoncer des activités jugées indésirables par des individus (seuls ou en tant que membres d'organisations variées). Les raisons motivant ce contrôle sont également variables, de la sécurité à la moralité, en passant par les intérêts commerciaux.

-TECHNOCRIME est un ouvrage qui regroupera des travaux sur l'impact des outils technologiques sur notre perception de la réalité, sur la transformation des pratiques sécuritaires, sur le rôle social donné aux nouvelles technologies dans le discours politique et sur l'utilisation de technologies pour attaquer des individus, des groupes, des États et des entreprises. L'ouvrage sera publié en langue anglaise chez Willan Publishing [Amazon.ca]

 

 

C H A P T E R S

  1. Foreword (Gary Marx)
  2. Introduction: What is Technocrime? (Stéphane Leman-Langlois
  3. Crime and Lawfulness the Age of All-Seeing Techno-Humanity (David Brin)
  4. The impact of Videosurveillance on the Social Construction of Security (Stéphane Leman-Langlois)
  5. Cyberwars and Cybercrimes (Benoît Gagnon)
  6. Policing through nodes, clusters and bandwidth (Johnny Nhan and Laura Huey)
  7. Second Life and governing deviance in virtual worlds (Jennifer Whitson and Aaron Doyle)
  8. Privacy as currency: crime, information and control in cyberspace (Stéphane Leman-Langlois)
  9. Information technology and criminal intelligence: a comparative perspective (Frédéric Lemieux)
  10. Scientific policing and criminal investigations (Jean-Paul Brodeur)
  11. Sorting systems: identification by database (David Lyon)
  12. A view of surveillance (Peter Manning)
  13. Afterword: Technopolice (Stéphane Leman-Langlois)

 

C O N T R I B U T O R S

David Brin
David Brin’s 1998 non-fiction book — The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? — deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during the information age. His chief argument, that openness is more effective than secrecy at fostering freedom, sparked controversy and garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association. David Brin’s papers in scientific journals cover an eclectic range of topics from astronautics, astronomy, and optics to alternative dispute resolution and the role of neoteny in human evolution. His Ph.D in Space Physics from the University of California at San Diego followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Space Institute and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Jean-Paul Brodeur
Jean-Paul Brodeur is currently a full professor at the École de criminologie of the University of Montreal, where he is also the director of the International Centre for Comparative Criminology. He is the author of some 102 refereed articles, 70 book chapters and 19 books and Canadian government reports. Jean-Paul Brodeur publishes in French, his native tongue, and also in English and German. Some of his books and articles have been translated in Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Brodeur was the director of research of several Canadian government commissions of inquiry on policing, sentencing, national security and the Canadian Armed Forces. He was awarded a prestigious Killam scholarship for years 2002-2004. He spent these years alternatively in France, at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and in the United Kingdom, where he was an invited fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Aaron Doyle
Aaron Doyle is Associate Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. His books include Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera (2003), Insurance as Governance (with Richard Ericson and Dean Barry, 2003), Uncertain Business: Risk, Insurance and the Limits of Knowledge (with Richard Ericson, 2004) and Risk and Morality (co-edited with Richard Ericson, 2003). Current research also includes work on risky occupations, gender and the body, and on the distinctive punitive properties of jails and detention and remand centres as opposed to prisons.

Benoît Gagnon
Benoît Gagnon is a Ph.D. candidate in Crimnology at the University of Montréal. As associated researcher at the Chaire du Canada en sécurité, identité et technologie, he works on areas such as cybercriminality, terrorism, security studies, and the role of technologies in securitisation processes. Benoît Gagnon is also a member of the Commission de l’éthique de la science et de la technologie of the government of Quebec.

Laura Huey
Laura Huey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Laura is the author of several publications in the fields of policing, surveillance and cybercrime. Her most recent project, Negotiating Demands; The Politics of Policing of Skid Row in Edinburgh, San Francisco and Vancouver, was published in 2007 by the University of Toronto Press.

Frédéric Lemieux
Frederic Lemieux is Assistant professor at the School of Criminology of the University of Montreal and researcher at the International Centre for Compared Criminology (ICCC). Much of his research has focussed on social control. He is currently conducting studies on the function of criminal intelligence as a formal social control tool. He has published various journal articles examining social control and crime as well as two books, the first one on the militarization police in 2005 and the second one on an international comparison of rules and practices in criminal Intelligence in 2006.

David Lyon
David Lyon is Queen’s Research Chair in Sociology and Director of the Surveillance Project at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He obtained a prestigious Killam Research Fellowship (2008-2010) to examine national ID card systems, and has authored and/or edited a number of books on surveillance, the most recent of which are Surveillance after September 11 (2003); Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (ed.2006); and Surveillance Studies: An Overview (2007).

Peter Manning
(Ph.D. Duke, 1966, MA Oxon. 1982) holds the Elmer V. H. and Eileen M. Brooks trustees Chair in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. He has taught at Michigan State, MIT, Oxford, the University of Michigan and elsewhere, and was a Fellow of the National Institute of Justice, Balliol and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, the American Bar Foundation, the Rockefeller Villa (Bellagio), and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford. Listed in Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in the World, he has been awarded many contracts and grants, the Bruce W. Smith and the O.W. Wilson Awards from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Michigan Sociological Association. The author and editor of some 13 books, including Privatization of Policing: Two Views (with Brian Forst) (Georgetown University Press, 2000), his research interests include the rationalizing and interplay of private and public policing, democratic policing as a social form, homeland security, crime mapping and crime analysis, uses of information technology, and qualitative methods. The 2ed. of Narcs’ Game [1979], appeared in 2004 (Waveland Press). His monograph, Policing Contingencies, was published in 2003 by the University of Chicago Press. His book Technology’s Ways is forthcoming in 2007 with NYU Press.

Johnny Nhan
Johnny Nhan is a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine. His current research is in the area of cyber-based crimes, particularly in relation to the intersection of public and private policing forms. He has also written in the field of Internet piracy.

Jennifer Whitson
Jennifer Whitson is a PhD student in Sociology at Carleton University. She is researching and publishing in the areas of communications technologies and identity theft, software and social control, and law and morality in on-line domains. In 2005 she co-edited a special double volume of the Journal Surveillance and Society on "Doing Surveillance Studies". A recent article on identify theft and care of the virtual self co-authored with Kevin Haggerty is forthcoming in the journal Economy and Society.