expected publication date: summer 2011

Following Technocrime
Technocrime 2 expands on many of the notions and concepts presented in the first book:

Technocrime does not exist. It is a figment of our imaginations. It is simply a convenient way to refer to a set of concepts, practices, frames, and knowledges shaping the ways in which we understand matters having to do with the impact of technology on crime, criminals and our reactions to crime — and vice-versa: since crime, criminals and reactions also transform technology. Technocrime includes crimes against computers, crimes committed with computers, cybercrimes, crimes involving credit cards, automated telling machines, communications apparatuses (such as satellite signal theft) or the violation of protection strategies (including alarm systems and CD/DVD copy protection schemes). Technocrime gives rise to technosecurity and technopolice, as sets of various activities explicitly designed to prevent or repress it (for a complete inventory, see Byrne and Rebovich, 2007). These responses are openly justified by descriptions of “new” technocrimes, with more lurid or horrifying behaviours calling for stricter laws, restrictions of due process rules and higher enforcement budgets. But it should not be assumed that technopolicing follows technocrimes. It may also simply be the logical extension of security and policing into the high-tech world.
Though private forms of technosecurity are clearly at the vanguard of high-tech crime protection, the state remains the leader in more exotic, generalized forms of applied, high-tech security (national security, military security) — though it relies on private industries for most of the tech provision, of course.
(from the introduction to Technocrime)

In the afterword,

Technology has always been a central element in warfare. The army with the best equipped soldiers, all other things being equal, had an edge over enemies less technologically advanced. This applies to weapon and defence systems of course, but also to support equipment, to information systems and to the logistics line needed to move, to distribute and maintain the battle technologies.
The war on crime, no longer a metaphor — like the war on poverty or the war on cancer — also shares this preoccupation with the enemy’s capabilities and with the question of whether “ours” will provide the clear, lasting superiority we seek. Sometimes this preoccupation comes from a rather straightforward contrast between the technologies used by criminals and the technologies available to police. For instance, it is easy to compare the firepower of criminal gangs and that of police, or the abilities of internet paedophiles with that of the cybercops who chase them. However, one must bear in mind that, while police adoption of technology is a quite deliberate, organized, often debated, delayed, mediatized, etc. process, those who engage in criminal, forbidden or otherwise irritating behaviour with the help of technology are in a much more spontaneous, opportunistic and “natural” dynamic. Today’s credit card skimmer is not yesterday’s mugger. Criminals do not adopt new technologies, they do not modify their trade. New criminals are seduced by opportunities offered by the new technologies that suffuse their world... just like technopolice advocates and practitioners.
Other times the contrast in technology mobilisation is more indirect: when a recent RCMP experiment to use spectrographic analysis of satellite images to detect marijuana plants, one technology — the peppering of small clutches of marijuana plants in the middle of large cornfields — won over the other — the insufficient 4m resolution of the imaging satellite available to police (CCRP, 2002).
Finally, in many instances police technology is contrasted not to technologies or tactics employed by criminals but to a type of crime or sometimes to “crime” in general. The involved technologies are guaranteed to impact significant aspects of criminality and to improve the general security of citizens. Video cameras are among such technologies. Their connection with their objective is a pure abstraction, based on symbols (that which is hidden must be revealed), theories (surveillance deters) or faith (technology works; it will work here as well).