Criminological Problems of the Digital World (Digital Criminology)

Abstract

The development of information society and the corresponding technologies raises to a new level the tasks of counteracting crimes committed using such technologies, and of minimizing damage from them. The growth in the scale of new types of crime is a cause of worry for the society and the authorities, and especially for criminologists, as the penetration of criminals into the virtual environment and their mastery of new technologies acquire dangerous forms, change criminal motivation and, at the same time, to some extent stimulate the development of information and telecommunication technologies. The growing sophistication of the tasks of preventing and counteracting hi tech crimes makes it necessary to critically assess the current criminological methods and to make an attempt to go beyond the known «common» methods of neo-classical criminology. The development of the digital criminology concept cannot be reduced to an aggregate of pioneer technological methods developed on the basis of mathematical modeling, i.e. computer processing of quantitative and qualitative parameters of crimes, mathematical detection of different dependencies (on time, place and other variables), it could and should be understood in a wider sense: on the one hand, it should influence the new criminological paradigm, and on the other - it should develop within its boundaries. The modern information-analytical sphere in the work of law enforcement bodes includes the use of digital criminological instruments within the programs of crime prevention, mathematical methods of analyzing crimes, profiling, etc. Their aggregate is generally applicable to criminological analysis and prediction, however, it does not have the most cutting edge theoretical basis that corresponds to the tasks of counteracting crimes of the digital world; it is now being formed on the basis of criminological neo-classics, the advances of the social sciences and the humanities, digital criminology. The predictions of new industrial revolutions include a rapid acceleration of the pace of technological development, a systemic transformation of production and management, which will not only stimulate a global rise in the living standards, but will also increase inequality and, consequently, will provide an impetus to crime. These aspects should be taken into consideration when predicting future development of digital criminology, whose theories should be based on the conceptual models of social development of the near future. Social consequences of the predicted new industrial revolutions will inevitably become new common determiners of the crimes of the future, as it always happened in the past.