International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 52

A (Guided) Tour of the Digital Wild West
out espionage or blackmail, find compromising information, or gain an unfair
market advantage, and so on.
Some British academic researchers contend that criminal e-commerce now
has its own mega-servers—a kind of illicit Amazon or Facebook—which transact
over 1,500 billion dollars of business a year, similar to the gross national product
(GNP) of Russia. Indeed, they claim that if “black market cyber capitalism” were a
country, it would be the thirteenth biggest in the world by GNP.
Through these mega-servers, which typically operate on the dark net, a
huge and ever-increasing clientele can gain easy access to drugs, weapons, ammunition,
explosives, hacking tools, illegal services, expert opinion from hackers, and
training in online fraud.
As with any well-managed system, these criminal mega-servers spend
around 300 billion dollars per year on improving their sites and their technical
infrastructure, on streamlining their customer interactions, optimizing their “customer
experience,” and so on. Of the 1,500 billion plus dollars a year that these
mega-servers transact:
• black market trading (illegal online markets) : 860 billion USD
• hacking, theft of intellectual property : 500 billion USD
• espionage, sale of stolen data : 160 billion USD
• sale of tools for hacking and online sabotage : 1.6 billion USD
• ransoms obtained from use of ransomware : 1 billion USD
... and so on.
Digital Identity: A Serious Problem Still Unresolved
To date, there exists no universal digital equivalent of the passport. Trying to prove
your identity online is impossible because—and this cannot be repeated enough—
the libertarian “configuring powers” of the net have staked everything on connectivity
and communication, with no concern for security. Fluidity is the key! The
rest? Look at that later. Maybe. In the physical world, authentication of ID relies on
direct cognition (meeting a person) or recognition (acceptance of ID credentials).
But it is not so straightforward in the digital world. What happens in the case of
lost, falsified, or stolen original documents? How about those famous “security
questions” (mother’s maiden name, and so on)? According to Google, the answers
have been forgotten in 74 percent of cases. In practice, no technology currently
meets all the necessary criteria of being simple, clear, unbreakable, and compatible
with all user systems, computers, and smartphone platforms.
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