No abstract

The prevalence of using email as a communication tool for personal and professional purposes makes it a significant attack vector for cybercriminals. Consensus exists that phishing, i.e. use of socially engineered messages to convince recipients into performing actions that benefit the sender, is widespread as a negative phenomenon. However, little is known about its true extent from a criminal law perspective. Similar to how the treatment of phishing in a generic manner does not adequately inform the relevant law, a case-by-case legal analysis of seemingly independent offences would not reveal the true scale and extent of phishing as a social phenomenon. The current research addresses this significant gap in the literature. To study this issue, a qualitative text analysis was performed on (N=42) emails collected over a 30-day period from two email accounts. Secondly, the phishing emails were analysed from an Estonian criminal law perspective. The legal analysis shows that in the period of only one month, the accounts received what amounts to 3 instances of extortion, 29 fraud attempts and 10 cases of personal data processing related misdemeanour offences.

Purpose As a well-known social institution, crime prevention has traditionally been in the purview of public authorities. However, the ceaseless increase in the use of online resources and governments’ responsibilisation approach to cybercrime prevention has created an ecosystem, which necessitates the empowerment of individuals. By introducing the concept of internal spheres of protection, the purpose of this paper is to show how traditionally public responsibilities require increased facilitation by individuals to adequately safeguard what they value. Design/methodology/approach This is a brief conceptual paper, which recasts the individual’s role in cybercrime prevention through a critique of the routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979) and explains how responsibilisation (Garland, 1996) has created an unavoidable need to provide individuals with the knowledge and tools required to avoid online victimisation. Findings In the context of cybercrime, criminological theories that are limited in considering the individual both as the target of crime and the person likeliest to prevent it are quickly becoming outdated. Public authorities either cannot intervene or are moving away from intervening on citizens’ behalf to effectively stymie the pressure from cybercriminals. Thus, there is a need of an approach that starts with individuals and their value-based motivations. Originality/value The concept of internal spheres of protection is a novel way of looking at cybercrime prevention. The internal spheres are based on individuals’ values, and the value of security in particular, and take cyber-knowledge as a point of departure towards safeguarding such values, i.e. through risk-decreasing actions and the use of relevant tools.

Taken as a whole, Human-Machine Communication: Rethinking Communication, Technology, and Ourselves (edited by Andrea L. Guzman) is a thought-provoking introduction to the ideas and implications of communication between humans and machines. The book comprises a collection of articles grappling with the broader aspects of and consequences from treating non-human entities as subjects or targets of communication, and what this could mean for humanity.In the introduction, Guzman does an excellent job of placing humanmachine communication in the storied developments that have taken place in the field of communication studies. More specifically, Guzman expertly navigates the particularities of the study of human-machine communication as distinct from (and similar to) the study of human-tohuman communication. The editor's introduction provides a succinct overview of what the reader can expect from the book while making the subject matter accessible to those less familiar with the underpinnings of communication studies.

Background: Growing public concern about the safety and security of schools has led many schools and school districts within the United States to hire private companies to monitor students' online interactions and the content they create, including on social media. The use of such technologies supposedly increases schools' awareness of what students are doing online and, thus, helps to identify and prevent potential issues such as mental health problems, cyberbullying, or self-harm that might otherwise go unnoticed. However, there is currently no evidence to support that social media surveillance or content monitoring is able to effectively address these public health and safety issues. Methods: Thus, our study explores how the different voices present in the discoursestudents, school officials, privacy advocates, and service providers' representativesjustify or condemn the surveillance of student-produced online content in publicly available news media articles. We adopt a critical discursive psychology approach to study news articles, which were published in international media in the last 3 years (2019 N = 53; 2020 N = 56; 2021 N = 77), reporting on the use of digital surveillance technologies targeting student-produced content. Results and conclusions: Three dominant interpretive repertoires emerged from the analyzed news media articles: 'silenced students, expert adults', 'a solution in search of a problem', and 'the normalization of surveillance for a good cause'. Our findings show that, under the auspices of protecting children, schools are actively engaged in 'doom-monitoring', which is the indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance of people in anticipation of the next bad thing. The opinions and views of adults, including school officials, vendors, and civil liberties advocates, dominate over the voices of students. Key Practitioner Message• Schools use digital surveillance tools to 'doom-monitor' students on a mass scale.• Doom-monitoring is the indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance of people in anticipation of the next bad thing. • In discussions of school surveillance, student voices are mostly silent, and adults speak for them.• Doom-monitoring success stories are anecdotal but reports of negative effects, for example the 'chilling effect' on students' free expression, are common.