Elsevier

Computers & Security

Volume 20, Issue 6, 1 September 2001, Pages 475-478
Computers & Security

Special Features
Organized Crime Goes Cyber

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-4048(01)00604-6Get rights and content

Introduction

Criminal cartels have been around since the dawn of history. While Ancient Rome, Greece and the Persian Empire have all withered, organized crime has proved resistant to the forces of history. It has also proved adaptive and resistant to governmental efforts to vanquish it.

Like the one celled amoeba it has outlived those who sought to destroy it; as well as adapting to the technological changes around it. Lest we forget, organized crime, and not the captains of industry, first learned to utilize the marvels of the communication age in the 1930s, to expand and enhance its control over their daily operations of its vast economic holdings.

Today, as in the 1930s, organized crime, both within and outside the Americas, has learned to master the new technologies and now employs cyber-space in its commercial endeavours. Commerce, and not violence, is the prime directive of organized crime. The later is employed, to assure the crime cartels of their monopoly over vast segments of the global economy.

In the United States alone, organized crime is a half-a-trillion dollar business; dwarfing both the auto industry and much of the high tech sector. The heads of organized crime, unlike the chieftains of cyber-space, have managed to maintain a low profile; demonstrating better business acumen than their counterparts in the cyber-sector.

In the final analysis, much of the financial success of the Internet emanates from the successful pornography market and not e-commerce. The crime syndicates and not the dons of Wall Street, can rightfully take the credit for the success of the online entertainment industry. Organized crime is a key player in cyber space; one that may, in the final analysis, determine the form and shape of the Internet; as well as the governmental regulations that may follow.

Section snippets

Scope of the Threat

Organized crime the world over, is a simple social organism. Kinship ties, loyalty to family and friends, even a semblance of religion and ideology, are the cement that hold organized crime together. Geography and territoriality, the very foundations that formulate the existence of the nation-state, play a minor role in the edifice of organized crime. Their traditional markets have simply adapted to cyber-space.

The Future of Organized Crime

In the pre-Internet days, traditional criminologists thought that the advent of the cashless-paperless society would also mark the decline and fall of crime in America; possibly the world over. The reasoning being that, without paper currency and paper-based transactions, thieves would be hard pressed to steal. The Internet, it was thought, would bring crime to its heels.

Yet the crime syndicates, both within and outside America, have adapted to the changes in their environment. The mob has been

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