ABSTRACT

This chapter will focus on some of the darker sides of the Internet and its action spaces, legal darker sides, as well as illegal ones. Some of the operations that take place over the Internet, which are considered as dark, are actions such as identity theft, which are performed by a small number of users who attempt to benefit themselves while damaging numerous others, without their engagement in any specific virtual activity. Thus, the effect of such dark uses might be extensively wide, reaching and affecting numerous innocent users in many systems and countries. Other darker sides of the Internet consist of measures instituted by organizations rather than by individual users, in an attempt to avoid actions by others, such as censorship imposed by governments in order to avoid or in order to direct Internet actions by their citizens. Darker activities may, thus, be performed by governments, groups and individuals. The darker side of the Internet constitutes the other side of the “open code,” which was highlighted, at the time, as the most important feature of the Internet (Lessig 2001). Hence, the very existence of free flow of information over the Internet may be used negatively via cybercrime, or it may even be blocked through cyberobstruction, and we will generally outline these two terms in the next section. This general discussion of the darker sides of the Internet will be followed by more particular explorations focusing on: surveillance, identity theft, censorship, hacking, pornography and online gambling. These general and specific discussions will then be complemented by the presentation of some country data on cybercrime and cyberobstruction.