Today's new forms of criminality in cyberspace are growing across Europe and beyond. They seem as "cybernetic battlefield" where the enemy appears as a picture on the video screen' (Robins & Webster, 1999:150). Cyberspace has become one of the most hunted spaces where self-identities are exposing hatred, conflicts and other related behaviour to be classified as a crime among other things. According to the Council of Europe “the fight with them can only be won with the necessary tools and, in particular, highly effective international co-operation in criminal matters” (Vel, 2007:3). This is the motive why culture secretary of Great Britain calls for “internet code of decency” (Fenton & Tait, 2008:4).
It was the reason that pushed the US to undertake a worldwide initiative to fight Cybercrime. The US Department of Justice announced “the Cybercrime Treaty as an important tool in stopping cybercrimes which are being deliberately staged through several countries in order to make the crimes difficult to investigate and stop” (Online: http://www.localtechwire.com/). 38 nations, including 34 European countries, signed the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime in November of 2001. Almost seven years later, the Cybercrime Treaty shambled into effect twirled in controversy. Kevin Robins reminds us that, “it is as if the resurgent nationalism, urban fragmentation - had nothing at all to do with virtual space. As if they were happening in a different world”, and as if there is nothing to do with crime and with hatred (Robins, 1996:4).
The Free Dictionary classifies hate as “intense animosity or dislike; hatred” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hate). This is what Toffler called “breaking the code” (Toffler, 1981:59). According to Toffler much of the angry conflict in many fields of our life today actually "centres on these half-dozen principles, as Second Wave people instinctively apply and defend them and Third Wave people challenge and attack them” (Toffler, 1981:60). The Second Wave was the industrial revolution. Toffler writes: "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction” (Toffler, Wikipedia online). He uses different words to explain what he calls the Third Wave: the "high speed' revolution, the post-industrial society. Toffler among some words uses: age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, scientific-technological revolution, "which to various degrees predicted diversity, knowledge-based production" (Toffler, Wikipedia online).
This presentation aims to discuss how increasing criminality in cyberspace is growing across Europe and beyond. It focuses specifically within the facts in one of the most problematic area for this problem: the Balkan countries. After describing aspects of how and where criminality in cyberspace is shown, the presentation will focus on various dimensions of facts in space. In doing so, a number of theoretical cyberspace facts that can be used as examples to analyse the question of cybercrime will be presented. The relationship between these theoretical cyberspace facts and space users is conceptualised from different angles.
Hatred and Conflict Towards Heated new Europe?
The Balkan Countries among others seem to be the most problematic. In June 2007 Greek TV Mega publicly showed a sequence where four Greek Police Officers beat up two Albanian immigrants in Greece. Later on, this video was uploaded in video-sharing website YouTube under the title: “Greek Police beat up Albanians.”
This video's involvement in many online forums, in which it caused a lot of tension between the two sets of Internet users, caused so much trouble that the Greek Government was forced to take action on the police officers involved, by sacking them, and on TV Mega, by fining them a sum of Є100, 000. As a result this video was later removed from YouTube. Furthermore, since five months ago another video has been circulating the cyberspace, claiming to show
three Albanian women from Macedonia stealing in a Macedonian shop. The faces of the two women are never shown, but they are dressed in typical clothes that Albanian women living in Macedonian cities wear. This could suggest that the women are actors in a video designed to provoke hatred between two nationalities. Toffler suggests “conflict in society is not only necessary, it is, within limits, desirable” (Toffler, 1981:431). According to Toffler “no civilization spreads without conflict” (1981:96). Furthermore the worst Cyberspace problems in the Balkans are caused between Albanian and Serbian Internet users. Internet users of these two nationalities have experienced Cybercrime problems for a long time, though they were intensified after the problems in Kosovo broke out. Recently though, the problems have become more than national and ethnic problems, they have become cultural: it was recently released in
YouTube that the
Serbian winning entry for Eurovision 2007 was copied from a previous Albanian song. These problems in the most heated place, as the Balkan is historically known, shows that where only “the technology is new … it seems; there is little that is new or surprising” (Robins, 1996:6). However, all of these problems show that the Cybercrime Treaty is not effective enough to deal with Cybercrime that takes place constantly. So, Cyberspace could be called Cyberhatred. According to Robins “in the new world, old and trusted boundaries - between human and machine, self and other, body and mind, hallucination and reality - are dissolved and deconstructed” (Robins, 1996:8). In similar way Kumar sees “the realization of the cybernetician's dream: a social organism with a seemingly infinite capacity for orderly growth and development, able to manipulate or adjust itself to every demand of its internal and external environment” (Kumar, 1978:224).
