The internet has brought the world closer together, and the closer human ties and blurred national boundaries it creates are often blamed for the evils of globalization—infringement of privacy; violation of data security and confidentiality, copyright and intellectual property law; spread of pornography and hate sites; online fraud and money laundering; dissemination of rumour; closer connections among cross-border criminal syndicates; character assassination under the guise of news; and much else. So far it seems that many of us haven’t bothered to turn to the other side of the coin and look at the internet’s role in helping us solve these evils that it might have helped to create in the first place.
Luckily, some aren’t so blind, and are talking more and more about the crime-fighting potential of the internet, with the immensely popular Facebook and Youtube as the pioneer weapons. And they’ve discovered that creative use of these social networking and video sharing tools can define a brand new frontier of law enforcement.
There is a recent video uploaded on Youtube, with a Russian-speaking Police Officer appealing to women from Moscow lured to work overseas as prostitutes to contact the Police immediately to provide clues to the authorities to raid the human trafficking ring and rescue other victims in similar predicament. Since it was only uploaded in January this year, the video’s effectiveness in helping disintegrate the multi-national criminal operations remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it’s pointing to a whole new vista of crime-fighting as well as crime prevention.
Several like-minded policemen in Canada are even going a step further, posting videos calling for help and inviting tips from viewers from all corners of the world. The cases involved range from abandoned babies at local downtown street corners to serious murder cases in which the culprits might have fled overseas, rendering tips from overseas viewers all the more important. Constable Scott Mills, the officer who initiated all this, even opened a Facebook account specifically dedicated to educating the public about the Crime Stoppers Programme and soliciting tips worldwide.
As for Facebook, with its increasingly intricate connections which still attracts hundreds of thousands of new subscribers every day, you can now find anything about anybody online, so there’s actually a pretty good chance for anyone to come up with a “friend” who might have known someone involved with the people they’re looking for. There’s really no reason why the Police shouldn’t capitalize on this and treat this online socializing web as a plausible future alternative of law enforcement. I guess the best way forward would be to continue with the traditional information gathering that comes from the old fashioned means of telephone hotline, TV appeals and personal interview, and, at the same time, benefit from the relative ease of making appeals and identifying targets provided by the wide social networking web on the internet.
While it sounds like these popular internet tools are highlighting a new form of cyber vigilantism and offering unprecedented opportunities in fighting crimes, we should be careful not to be misguided by groundless accusations and malicious spread of false information which might constitute defamation. If the information obtained hasn’t been verified before being acted on, leading the investigation onto the wrong track, extra resources would be wasted at best, and the civil liberty of some individuals might be jeopardized at worst. Besides, anonymity of information sources should also be guaranteed to ensure a steady flow of useful information. As long as these online tools are used in a creative and responsible way, the internet will always have the chance to make up for the evils that it has helped cause along with globalization. Using online networking tools in crime-fighting actually underlines a trend of seeking a form of “distributed justice”, says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In the process, some web users have become part of a distributed justice system, and many others are acting as judge and jury in the cyber space.
