Underground forums are used to discuss and organise cybercrime (as well as more conventional social activities). These forums are also commonly used for exchanging various digital currencies, either gained through the profits of crime or through less controversial means. Understanding the link between discussions of illicit behaviour and currency exchange can provide insights to identify money laundering and other parts of the cybercrime supply chain. In this paper we use natural language processing to classify posts from HackForums by crime type over a period of more than 10 years. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this type of classification has been used for this large forum dataset. Although the majority of conversations in the forum were identified as relating to non-criminal discussions, we concentrate on the types of crimes being discussed by those exchanging currencies. We find the most popular topics are related to trading credentials and bots and malware. PayPal was one of the most widely advertised digital currencies and we observe significant displacement from Liberty Reserve to Bitcoin after the former was taken down in 2013. Rather than an explicit 'cashing out' mechanism, in which cryptocurrencies gained through crime flow into state-backed fiat currencies, we instead see a circulation of capital between different forms, as cash is held and then cashed back and forward according to movements in the wider currency market. We continue our examination of discussions of cryptocurrencies and explore how the underground market has reacted to new opportunities, with a qualitative case study about Facebook's putative 'Diem' coin. We find that while most discussions are related to the technical details and potential investment opportunities, some potential cybercrime use-cases are raised.

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We have identified an emerging tool being used by the UK government across a range of public bodies in the service of public policy - the online targeted advertising infrastructure and the practices, consultancy firms, and forms of expertise which have grown up around it. This reflects an intensification and adaptation of a broader ‘behavioural turn’ in the governmentality of the UK state and the increasing sophistication of everyday government communications. Contemporary UK public policy is fusing with the powerful tools for behaviour change created by the platform economy. Operational data and associated systems of classification and profiling from public bodies are being hybridised with traditional consumer marketing profiles and then ‘projected’ onto the classification systems of the targeted advertising infrastructures. This is not simply a case of algorithms being used for sorting, surveilling, and scoring; rather this suggests that targeted interventions in the cultural and behavioural life of communities are now a core part of governmental power which is being algorithmically-driven, in combination with influencer networks, traditional forms of messaging, and frontline operational practices. We map these uses and practices of what we describe as the ‘Surveillance Influence Infrastructure’, identifying key ethical issues and implications which we believe have yet to be fully investigated or considered. What we find particularly striking is the coming-together of two separate structures of power - the governmental turn to behaviourism and prevention on one hand, and the infrastructures of targeting and influence (and their complex tertiary markets) on the other. We theorise this as a move beyond ‘nudge’ or ‘behavioural science’ approaches, towards a programme which we term ‘influence government’.

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