How do you describe your job when you meet people at a party?
I tell people I’m a criminologist, which always seems to be met with at least some polite interest. The only place many people have come across criminologists before is in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I explain my research is in the areas of either high-tech crime or using technology to undertake ‘traditional’ criminology research. My focus is on the crossover between traditional and hi-tech areas, like dishonesty, for instance. This is a traditional area but we approached it in a web-based study. I’m interested in high-tech crimes and the misuse of technology.
What is ‘cutting-edge’ about your work?
My area, high-tech crime, is always going to be cutting edge. As technology evolves, the way that the criminal fraternity uses it is constantly evolving. I look at ways in which criminals take advantage of technology and find new ways in which to exploit people. As soon as there’s a fix for a vulnerable area, they’re usually going to try something else.
What are the biggest implications your work will/could have in the future?
There is a great unanswered question about how we as a society govern the use of technology – technology in governments, jobs, industry, individual use… What is the best, most coherent, means of governance? I hope the work that I do has policy-making implications. I’ve recently submitted written evidence to the House of Lords who are looking into how to protect the UK from large-scale cyber attacks. You can find out more information about this initiative on the UK Parliament website:
www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/lords_s_comm_f/eufwrevid.cfm
Describe some of the highlights of your average day.
The most rewarding part of our work is once we’ve got something together that we think might be of interest to the general public, or some specialist body, we throw it out there and find out that they actually are interested. A highlight is getting this extra recognition of the work we do and the value that’s in it. We’re happy if we can make a small improvement to society as a result of our work. I won the Joseph Lister award in 2006, issued by the British Science Association, who do excellent work in the area of science communication. They give five award lectures each year which are given at the annual British Science Festival. You get nominated and then they get in touch to ask you questions about your work and eventually you find out whether you’ve won or not. My award was on the social aspects of Computer Misuse and the lecture was entitled “Computer Says No”.
Describe briefly how your career has progressed to date.
I did my first degree in physics at Cambridge. Then I was a proper scientist. When I graduated I moved into the IT industry. I thought about staying on with my studies, but I was fed up with being poor. This was during the early nineties IT boom. I thought, I’ll do this a bit and see how it goes. Twelve years later I had worked my way through the IT industry to become a director of advanced technology for a Silicon Valley company. I got a bored with that – I was spending a lot of time with corporate solicitors and attorneys. I did a job as a senior director of a consulting company for Europe doing a lot of project-based stuff. But I was missing studying – it felt like my brain was turning to mush. I did a law degree part-time with the Open University. Four years later I had a law degree, gave up IT, and moved into criminal law and criminology. I then did a full-time PhD on computer misuse at Leeds
How is your job cross-disciplinary?
My job involves computer science, psychology, sociology, law, politics, governance, technology… all sorts of stuff!
How do you see your field developing over the next 5-10 years?
As we’re becoming virtualized, we’re going to see a lot more virtual crimes in things like “Second Life”. Do individuals suffer the same kind of harm if their character or avatar is violated in some way? How does that work, what’s the jurisdiction? There are many philosophical questions. We’re going to get to a stage where technology is so decentralized that areas like traditional law enforcement, policing, ideas of sovereignty, jurisdiction etc. all become fuzzy and complicated. How do we deal with that?
What’s the most unexpected thing about your job?
A big highlight was the Honesty Lab Project
www.honestylab.com: The dishonesty project isn’t to do with high-tech crime, but it’s another piece of criminal law research looking at what ordinary people think of as honest or dishonest behaviour. There is a test in criminal law for any offence that involves dishonesty – e.g. theft, burglary, or fraud. The jury has to decide if the person on trial was being dishonest. If the jury says no, that person isn’t liable for the crime. That’s a big decision for a jury. But there’s no definition of “dishonesty” in the statutes. Instead the law relies upon the “Ghosh test” introduced in 1982 which asks that a jury considers two questions, “Was the conduct dishonest according to the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people?” and “Did the defendant realize that?” These questions have sparked a lot of academic criticism. No one has done an experiment to see what ordinary people think is dishonest behaviour. I worked on this project at Brunel University with Dr. Emily Finch from the University of Surrey, and we put together an experiment to test what ordinary people perceive to be dishonest. Our website, www.honestylab.com, asked its visitors to look at five video clips which looked like they were chosen at random (but they weren’t). Each video clip had a talking head explaining what they’d done and participants were asked a series of questions: “Do you think what this person has done is dishonest?”, “Have you ever done what this person has done?”, “Would you convict this person as part of a jury?”, “Would you ever do this (i.e. what the person in the clip said that they’d done)?” The heart of the experiment was these questions. If the participants thought the conduct was dishonest it should follow that they would convict them. But there wasn’t 100% correlation. There are certain acts which can satisfy all elements of a criminal offence but the person won’t be convicted by a jury. People are more forgiving of acts they have done, or would consider doing themselves. The website went live in May 2009 and we shut it off at the end of September. We had just under 20,000 responses and around 50,000 video ratings from 50 video clips. There was a lot of data! We almost blew up a data analysis tool trying to analyze it. We presented our original findings at the British Science Festival at the University of Surrey last September. The project got picked up by the press, including an Observer piece which the BBC latched on to over the summer and subsequently interviewed us. In the two hours that it took to get home from the studio, 7000 people had logged on and done the experiment! We’re planning to write a series of articles on our findings about the public’s perceptions of dishonesty which should open a debate about whether or not the courts are using the right test. We’re also thinking of doing a comparative study of Australia, who started out using the Ghosh test but have modified it slightly.
What’s the biggest achievement of your career so far?
The thing that’s been the most satisfying has been publishing my first book on Computer Misuse (April 2009, Willan Publishing). It’s derived from my PhD and took four years to write
