Posted: September 7th, 2016

Online Hacking: Effects on Delivery of Criminal Justice

An extension from the following­ Online Hacking: Effects on Delivery of Criminal Justice The internet hastens processes across a variety of human activities. Both individuals and organizations benefit from how the internet removes geographical and time constraints. Unfortunately, the internet has also spawned a myriad of problems, one of which is online hacking. By its very nature, hacking involves the unauthorized access to sensitive information. This virtual intrusion can eventually make sensitive information fall into the wrong hands. For that reason alone, hacking is similar to trespassing, except that the crime is done in the online world. Hacking is an issue in criminal justice mainly because it results in losses that can be on a massive scale and because the perpetrators cannot be easily brought to justice. Indeed, identifying the perpetrators is a difficult task right at the start. This is because hackers typically hide their tracks on the internet in order to evade possible prosecution. With data breaches leading to millions of dollars of losses combined with the challenge of pinning down the hackers, hacking is undoubtedly a grave social concern, especially since the world has rapidly become digitally wired via the internet. To the extent that hacking is a bane to society, there is every reason to address it. Otherwise, society stands to lose so much. People and businesses will no longer engage in online banking. No database, whether from the government or private institutions, will be spared. Hacking sees its inception alongside with the growth of the internet during the 1990s (Gunkel, 2000, p. 811). The internet back then was not as complicated as it is now. However, since the early 2000s, cases of hacking have steadily increased (Inan, Namin, Pogrund & Jones, 2016, p. 31). As more sensitive information became stored in databases that can be accessed online, the threat of hacking likewise increased. Hacking itself had to evolve due to the increase in the capabilities of database security systems. For instance, in 2011, Aaron Swartz allegedly connected to the network of MIT and downloaded millions of academic documents stored in the online database JSTOR (Gitelman, 2014, p. 78). In the same year, Andrew Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler obtained countless email addresses of AT&T iPad users without proper authorization (Inan, Namin, Pogrund & Jones, 2016, p. 31). In more recent years, the online hacking group Anonymous has defaced countless of websites across the world. To this day, most of the hackers remain beyond the reach of criminal justice. In all of these, the criminal justice system itself has to constantly improve in terms of identifying the culprits in order to bring hackers to justice. In the early years of the internet, hacking was as not as big a concern as it is today. People back in the 1990s rarely ever had access to the internet, so it was reasonable to expect that hacking was beyond their immediate worries. But as the internet expanded its social reach and as more people gained internet access, the public started to realize how the information that they provide online can be accessed by others under certain circumstances (Carle & Perritt, 2006, p. 45). Indeed, the threat has grown to the extent that it can no longer be ignored that the government has to pass legislation that will prosecute cases of hacking (Carle & Perritt, 2006, p. 45). With the passage of such laws, it may be said that the public perception shifted greatly. People now take hacking as a very serious concern. Several infamous cases of hacking throughout the past decade have also increased the public�s wariness towards hacking