ABSTRACT
The Internet is a large network of smaller networks. It was first created in the 1980s so that various computer networks could communicate with one another through a standardized protocol suite, TCP/ IP. Simply put, different computer networks were connected together to form a larger network, which allowed for electronic messaging, such as e-mail and electronic bulletin boards. Later the introduction of World Wide Web significantly enriched the Internet and the improvement on connection speed expanded the utility of the Internet to a scope limited only by imagination. By the year of 2012, the Internet had reached 2,405,000,000 users, a 566% worldwide growth from
Major Issues 61 Internet and Crime 61 Human Trafficking: Victimology on the Internet 63 Human Trafficking: Internet as the Hunting Ground 66 Human Trafficking: Internet as the Marketing Place 67 Human Trafficking: Investigating on the Internet 69 Human Trafficking: Crime Prevention and the Internet 70 Summary 71 Key Terms 72 Review Questions 72 References 72
the year of 2000 (Miniwatts Marketing Group 2013). Since the Internet’s original purpose was convenience, safety and regulation were not on top of the developers’ list, not until recent years. As a side effect of the exponential growth of the Internet, criminal-minded people started to seek opportunities in cyberspace. The Internet not only offers easy and cheap access to a large group of potential victims but also provides a pseudo-anonymous environment for criminals to conceal or misrepresent their identities. It is pseudoanonymous because technically a user’s Internet activity is not entirely untraceable to the extent of being absolutely anonymous. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of Internet activities oftentimes renders undesirability for such tracing, and thus creates a sense of secrecy similar to anonymity, aka pseudoanonymity. It is this sense of secrecy that not only attracts cybercriminals who commit crimes that could not be otherwise committed outside the cyberworld (e.g., hacking or digital piracy) but also tempts conventional criminals to exploit the Internet as a new playground (e.g., child pornography or cyberbullying). Very quickly, criminal activities on the Internet started to catch attention and call for concern because of its rampancy and the lack of effective curb. This type of crime is generally referred to as cybercrime.
