The Future of Digital Crimes and Digital Terrorism Information technology has evolved making trade and other economic activities more efficient. It has found widespread applications in various aspects of peoples and nations activities such as banking, online trading, law enforcement and defense. At the same time, criminals and law breakers including terrorists have used this to harm countries economies. This paper will look into the future of digital crimes and terrorism and what the US government can do to protect the citizen and the entire country. Information technology would generally help to make the fight against digital crime more productive. This is due to the great potential this field has. The law enforcement agencies through the use of information technology would be able to track and arrest hackers, people who steal data as well as those who engage in illegal transfer and reception of money among others. The impact of the use of information technology in fighting cyber crime would among increase confidence in trade especially for traders who engage in online business, which would boost trade and other economic activities which would increase revenue for the population. Socially, people would have more confidence relating online especially through the social media as the fear of personal information falling into the wrong hands would reduce (Casey, 2004). The single most important problem resulting from the independent nature of law enforcement is lack of integrity by some law enforcement personnel. The great resources placed under some of these persons end up being misused. In the end, such people do not achieve the desired results. Sometimes, some of the persons may get compromised and work with the lawbreakers. The government can mitigate this by ensuring there is effective oversight and supervision to ensure that law enforcers are accountable. At the same time, the government can also ensure it employs law enforcement persons with high level of integrity. To maximize the results of the efforts made by federal agencies in order to better protect the nation against digital crime, the agencies should ensure that they work very closely with the specialists in the information technology industry. Through this, the agencies can be able to acquire useful information concerning the vulnerable areas where criminals can exploit (Walden, 2007). At the same time, the agencies should also team up with the specialists in the field and institutions of higher learning to conduct research aimed at identifying areas that could be a potential risk in the present and also in the future times. This requires the law enforcement agencies to be proactive and focus on prevention of digital crimes than focusing on arresting the offenders. Currently cyber criminals and others who engage digital crime have been seen to focus on stealing peoples identity. For instance, there has been theft of credit card numbers, drivers license numbers among others. This is a pointer to the future where it is expected that the greatest cyber crime will be in impersonation. As the world is moving towards virtual workplaces, virtual offices among others, cyber criminals might try to impersonate people, issue commands and directions and even spend peoples money especially in the online market. The future terrorisms will also focus on interfering with online money markets and online banking systems to cause panic. It might also focus in breaking down critical infrastructure. The US can safeguard against such occurrences through several ways. For instance, it can ensure that the critical infrastructure such as transports, water supply and water treatment, power grid are placed under a secure network and are not controlled through the internet. To prevent identity theft, the US can invest in development of online systems that are secure such that peoples personal information is not stolen and abused. As seen in terrorisms in the last few years, terrorist are as much as possible trying to use the targets resources to inflict the highest level of damage. This is projected to be the trend in future. With the current nature where everything is interconnected in the internet, terrorists can be able to do more harm into the economy, for instance, a single act of jamming the systems used in the airports and train station can cripple transport. Some countries have had instances where online banking information was interfered with making people unable to access such services. In such instances, the law enforcement agencies try to identify areas where the systems have been breached and arrest the culprits. In most cases, the federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI hires specialized programmers to identify areas where various systems could be vulnerable and recommend corrections (NATO Advanced Training Course on Defense Against Terrorism, Duyan, Kibarog?lu, & IOS Press, 2011). In some cases, the federal agencies also work to identify viruses and malware programs that could be released in the internet targeting the critical infrastructure or the law enforcement cheap essay writing service agencies. It has also been seen that some cyber criminals have written data mining programs that have targeted the US law enforcement agencies or the department of defense. In such instances, the agencies invest in developing current and futuristic programs to counter malwares including spyware programs. The US adopts a holistic approach to any computer related crime. The scope of investigation targets to reveal who the doer was, the motive, how it was done and weaknesses in the systems that the suspect exploited. This ensures that as the culprit receive justice, the law enforcement agencies have learned a lesson on how such a crime or its derivatives can be prevented in the future. As discussed earlier, the law enforcement agencies hire experienced specialists in the profession who can be able to map and judge trends in cyber crime (Moore, 2005). The processes involved in digital forensics involve trying to get the content of the suspects hard disk. The aim is usually to find if there are incriminating materials in the suspected computer and therefore subject the suspect to trial. The forensic investigator is usually armed with a powerful computer and a writer blocker which makes a copy of information in a switched of computer. He also has an assortment of softwares to determine presence of malwares and spywares in the internet. Information technology has had many ethical concerns in that it may avail information to the wrong people. At the same time, it is disruptive in the virtual work environment where workers log into the social media or check other things in the internet. In crime, information technology has the capacity to spread out the effects of crimes due to interconnected nature of systems in the internet. It also makes war and terrorism more efficient through increasing the damage to life and property. It also makes spying easy and increases the effects of war as critical virtue infrastructure gets damaged (Casey, 2004). The major issues occasioned by information technology as far as criminal justice is concerned are that both the offenders and the law enforcement might have the same level of knowledge and specialized skill. Additionally, the information technology allows a wide base for people to engage in cyber crime without being noticed. Furthermore, cyber crime is also seen as smart crime and criminals are seen to receive a fair treatment as compared to people engaging in conventional crimes. Crimes involving information technology are a recent, the laws and Acts have not been passed that are adequate to combat this effectively. This is hampered further as information technology is very dynamic. For that reason, the rate of evolution of cyber crimes by far outstrips the rate at which laws are passed to respond to these crimes (Bowden, 2011). Additionally, some of the cyber crimes including terrorism, wars and illegal spying are international in nature but the laws passed to respond to them are mostly on a national level which makes them ineffective. To conclude, the US needs to protect its citizen from cyber crimes, modern terrorism and also external aggression that may be implemented using information technology. With increasing threat of receiving a cyber attack on the critical infrastructure or the banking system, the government has to devise futuristic approaches to prevent and also respond to such occurrences appropriately. Reference Casey, E. (2004). Digital evidence and computer crime: Forensic science, computers and the Internet. London: Academic Press. Walden, I. (2007). Computer crimes and digital investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowden,M. (2011). Worm: The first digital world war. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Moore, R. (2005). Search and seizure of digital evidence. New York: LFB Scholarly Pub. NATO Advanced Training Course on Defense Against Terrorism, Duyan, A., Kibarog?lu, M., & IOS Press. (2011). Defence against terrorism. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
