Technology, Privacy and Economic Crimes
In the criminological firmament, white-collar
and organised crime have been treated as two separate dimensions of criminal
behaviour, except that as Sutherland argued in the 1930s, they were both
learned in ‘differential association’. They were reacted to differently, the
latter being seen as a threat to ‘society’ or to the ‘corporate state’, while
attacks on the former were seen as the preserve of political ‘radicals’.
This difference has been embraced by conventional researchers and scholars, who
like to view themselves as one or the other as a form of identity politics:
though ‘organised crime’ scholars from Alan Block onwards have shown the ways
in which gangsters were used by US corporations to break strikes and by the US
government to eliminate Italian communists post-war and then later Latin
American communists. There have been parallel analyses of the
prioritisation and powers of enforcement agencies and, to a much more limited
extent, of the role of the media in relation to business/political elites and
gangsters. This white-collar/organised crime disjunction has begun to break up
somewhat under the pressure of research in Central and Eastern Europe showing
the interpenetration of organised criminals and politicians locally -
especially in countries like Bulgaria and Romania – in regimes more democratic
than Russia.
I will examine the role played by
technology and privacy arguments in the commission and in the ‘policing’ of the
range of economic crimes – a rather loose term used more in continental Europe.
It is a common phenomenon that there is a partial shift in the
application of policing models used for organised crime to at least some forms
of white-collar crime, e.g. plea bargaining for sentencing reductions and
non-prosecutions (currently used in the FIFA case), sometimes using covert
wires (e.g. Boesky in the 1980s) plus sometimes Sting operations. Given
the Snowden and other revelations, one might have expected a large range of
material on economic misconduct by and against elites to be within the purview
of the agencies. The question is does anyone look at this or do anything
about it, or is their main task ‘national security threats’, again loosely defined?
Given the raised profile of regulatory agencies, and the volume of data sought
by police and regulatory investigators nationally and cross-border, the whole
issue of corporate privacy and the privacy of actions taken in a corporate
context become relevant. Who has ownership of these? Under what
conditions are they made available to the authorities (e.g. News
International)? And given that so many major financial services firms
have come under serious assault in relation to acts done for individual and/or
corporate self-interest (e.g. money laundering, LIBOR, FOREX), how is
dataveillance developing in the corporate sphere and what are the implications
for the public sphere? What are the implications of growing
‘responsibilisation’ of regulated entities to monitor potential and actual
clients and report suspicions (if any) to financial intelligence units, and
what issues does this raise for both liberty and effectiveness of
controls? Finally, what are the intersections between these developments
and the practice of journalism in different parts of the world?
No comments:
Post a Comment