Gefahren

If we assume that digitisation has primarily expanded human possibilities for action, then it does so regardless of the type of action and regardless of the intention of the action. It does so with regard to the way we organise our leisure time, how we educate ourselves, where we go on holiday, how we organise it. But it also does so with regard to behaviour that is not wrongly punished by the penal law. In this sense, digitalisation, if we put it in criminological terms, has created a lot of new crime opportunities, crime opportunity structures. There is this very famous circulated statement of a bank robber who was asked why he robbed banks, who said “because that’s where the money is”. Bank robbers are a dying breed these days. Criminals have learned that there are easier and also less risky ways to get other people’s money. You can hack into online payment systems, online payment processes, you can manipulate online payment processes, you can try to get to security-relevant customer information via malware, phishing and the like. However, cybercrime, digitalised crime is by no means limited to this attacks on digital payment transactions. When we think of bullying, bullying on social networks. Here too, we are dealing with forms of crime that can only exist against the background of digitalisation. Hate crime in social networks, sexual harassment on the Internet, attempted fraud, fraud via online media, blackmail via online media, attacks on the stability of digital systems. These are all forms of crime that can only exist because we live in a digital, digitised world. In criminology, the thesis is sometimes put forward that crime has declined, which we have fortunately recorded overall in many countries of the world over the last quarter century, that this should be understood primarily as a kind of transition of crime from the real world to the virtual world and as a partial invisibility of crime in the virtual world. I do not think this is entirely true. But what can be said and what is right about it is that digitalisation has created a lot of new opportunities for crime. Initially, there are not the appropriate protective mechanisms in place, and these new opportunities for action are being used accordingly.

• Weitere Informationen zu Thomas Görgen auf der Webseite der Deutschen Hochschule der Polizei
• Thomas Görgen bei Wikipedia
• Thomas Görgen beim Deutschen Präventionstag