Thread by @JohnnyHistone

Really pleased to see our new article published today in Policing and Society: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… Free version: tandfonline.com/eprint/CZ3PPJV… Accepted manuscript: cl.cam.ac.uk/~bjc63/infrast…

The article reports on a mixed-methods study on law enforcement's actions in #cybercrime communities, including quants analysis, interviews with people in these communities, and with LEAs (including interviews with FBI agents and UK law enforcement)

We found that arrests and sentencing have little effect on these online illicit economies, but centralised LEAs like the FBI are developing new strategies which are having surprising effects, both of which involve enrolling platforms/intermediaries.

In particular, the FBI's tactic of targeting the shared infrastructure on which these increasingly industrialised cybercrime economies rely (which we term 'infrastructural policing') appears to be extremely effective.

We managed to get a couple of really interesting interviews with FBI agents, and discuss in the article how this form of policing fits into the history of the institution and the careers of individual agents.

We also see a striking novel phenomenon - the expansion of #PREVENT into cybercrime policing. We found that the NCA have been using a mix of targeted adverts, editorials placed in the computer gaming press, etc. in order to dissuade customers for these illegal services

Astonishingly, this 'influence policing' seemed to be more effective than any of the other strategies, with a sophisticated targeted advertising programme corresponding to a serious decrease in this kind of cybercrime in the UK.

There are some really interesting aspects to this - in particular, how the NCA are making use of the surveillance advertising infrastructures built and maintained by Google in the service of frontline crime prevention as part of CYBER-PREVENT (now Cyber Choices).

This clearly raises serious questions - about privacy, ethics, accountability, democratic policing, the potential for unexpected consequences. It suggests that this expansion of PREVENT into policing is going to be something to watch, and is only likely to grow.

Thanks as ever to brilliant co-authors, @DanielRThomas24, Richard Clayton, @message4bob, and @YiTingChua2