Cyberspace is a Hunting Ground
Since context is such a central component of threatening speech in cyberspace, it is vital for criminal justice practitioners and policymakers to understand the multifarious ways in which the internet in general and social media in particular are commonly employed in the commission of specific types of violent crimes. Some violent criminals use the internet as a platform for engaging with a larger audience and communicating their intent to kill, sharing ideological beliefs, inspiring followers, and even livestreaming crimes like sexual assaults and homicides.31 The internet also contains uncountable spaces and opportunities for violent criminals to acquire knowledge about topics like how to make bombs or how to kill a person without leaving evidence, as well as sources to purchase tools like body armor, poison, and illegal weapons.32 One of the more chilling affordances the internet provides to violent criminals involves its use as a hunting ground where criminals can target, stalk, and interact with victims from a position of relative anonymity.33 Future research about the role of the internet in specific types of violent crime is urgently important because behavioral patterns can be used to develop profiles, inform threat assessments, and demonstrate proof of intent.34
It has been argued that internet-facilitated homicides should occupy their own special category as a distinct subtype of homicide, but it seems more likely that there is an online component to the majority of contemporary homicides given the rapid global digitization of many aspects of everyday life.35 In fact, federal and state law enforcement agencies have long recognized that the internet has given
29 Best, “Need to Uphold Individual Rights,” 1151-1152.
30 Lidsky and Norbut, “Context of Online Threats,” 1885-1887.
31 Recupero, “Homicide and the Internet,” 220.
32 Ibid., 218-219.
33 Ibid., 219.
34 Ibid., 224-225.
35 Ibid., 225.
criminals a huge technological advantage, provided them with easy access to a limitless population of potential victims, and rapidly transformed patterns like the methodology and victimology of traditional violent crimes.36 Given this knowledge, the internet and social media should be conceptualized as a networked support system that is transmogrifying the way violent crimes are fantasized about, planned, and committed rather than as a completely new environment signifying a new type of crime.37 This perspective makes it possible to examine the constituent components of a violent crime - offender, victim, behavior, motive, modus operandi, and harm - with the goal of understanding whether discrete patterns of internet use commonly affect any or all of these components during the perpetration of specific types of violent crimes.38 A brief investigation of some of the ways in which violent offenders use the internet will provide concrete real-world examples showing the kind of information that can be gleaned from internet surveillance and used to inform risk assessments and to establish dangerous intent.
Lone-actor or lone-wolf terrorists are individuals who commit violent crimes that are ideologically motivated and that are designed to spread fear without the support or direction of a larger group or organization.39 The title lone-wolf is a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are often involved with extremist groups through social media, they typically undergo a radicalization process through exposure to online extremist ideologies, and they may view themselves as representatives of a group rather than as lone actors.40 These individuals often spend a great deal of time fantasizing about and planning their attacks, and many solo mass shooters have posted comprehensive bodies of online content prior to their attacks including lengthy written manifestos, videos, and letters openly declaring their intentions to perpetrate attacks and identifying specific targeted individuals or locations.41 While manifestos riddled with hate speech and asinine videos detailing violent fantasies are protected by the First Amendment unless they signify imminent harm to a specific person or persons, these communications exist within a public forum, and they can be used to identify a person as a credible risk to the safety of others and to place that person under surveillance. Consistent expression of violent fantasies and hatred against individuals and groups can also be used to
36 John E. Douglas et al., Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crime (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013), 44-45.
37 Liem and Geelen, “Homicide and the Internet,” 70.
38 Aldona Kipane, “Meaning of Profiling of Cybercriminals in the Security Context,” SHS Web of Conferences 68 (2019): 1-15.
39 Mohammadmoein Khazaeli Jah and Ardavan Khoshnood, “Profiling Lone-Actor Terrorists: A Cross-Sectional Study of Lone-Actor Terrorists in Western Europe (2015-2016),” Journal of Strategic Security 12, no. 4 (2019): 26.
40 Ibid., 29.
41 Recupero, “Homicide and the Internet,” 220.
establish a pattern of behavior consistent with intent to commit a violent crime and used to prosecute individuals and to inform profiles to guide resource allocation.42
Crime statistics indicate that the United States has a high rate of strangerperpetrated homicides when compared with other industrialized nations, and research suggests that the internet plays a pivotal role in many stranger-perpetrated homicides including serial offenses.43 Killers who target strangers often do so for instrumental reasons, meaning they are motivated by the desire to obtain something from their victims such as renown, sexual gratification, money, or material objects.44 These predators use the cloak of cyberspace to hunt and lure their victims using strategies like designing fake social media accounts, offering to meet for sexual encounters, advertising jobs or services, promising to provide some sort of assistance, and engaging in various other forms of deception about their true identities and intentions.45 Although human behavior is dynamic and continuously evolving, violent criminals learn to use techniques that consistently help them to achieve their goals while minimizing undesirable risks; therefore, it is possible to identify and track indicators of online hunting, stalking, and luring behavior patterns with the aims of disrupting and preventing violent predation.46 These hunting behaviors are certainly more surreptitious than hate speech and open declarations of intent to kill on social media, but they still represent discernable behavior patterns that can be used in building offender typologies, guiding surveillance strategies, and establishing criminal intent, motive, and premeditation.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Misconstrual of Privacy in Cyberspace
- Demystifying True Online Threats vs. Protected Violent Speech
- Cyberspace is a Hunting Ground
- Shrinking Big Data
- Behavioral Profiling and Human Judgment
- Conclusion
- Bibliography