Everyone knows it is illegal to download and watch porns online. Regulation on illegal porns totally makes sense. But imagine you, or anyone getting busted by the police while watching porns… horrible. Then imagine a worse scenario - what if the police had taken photos of you watching porn!! This is what exactly happened in Australia, a couple of months ago. A group of hackers posed themselves as the federal police, activated the victim's webcams using a ransomware and took photos of them. They didn't stop at the point and went even further to extort money from them. Never did they forget to use the logo of Austalian Federal Police to make the fee look more 'legitimate'!!
As Suler says, the online environment shows one's hidden constellation withinself-structure (321). Then exactly what element of disinhibition effect triggered the con-artists to disguise themselves as the police and made the victim to fork over quite a lot of money? In the case described above, two main factors created disinhibition effect. First one is the dissociative anonymity and theother one is minimization of status and authority.
The first factor to be discussed is quite obvious, but still it was an essential part of this cybercrime. The criminals could alter their identity because, obviously,they were anonymous and were not afraid of ‘acting out’ (322).Not only were they anonymous, but they had the technology and know-how to access and activate their victims’ webcam and to disguise themselves as police in a convincing way. Plus, we need to talk about the threatening and extortion part of this cybercrime. Could they (the criminals) have committed crime the same way if their identity had not been concealed? Invading into someone’s embarrassingly personal life and shamelessly taking webcam shots of others watching porns? Would they have done the same stuff in real life as if they were some sort of animals without conscience? Another Interesting thing about dissociative anonymity in this case was that it worked on the victims' part as well as the criminals’ part. Remember, the scapegoats were watching porns, which is an illegal behavior that breaches federal laws regarding copyright and privacy, etc. According to Suler, dissociative anonymity helps people to avert responsibility for [their] behaviors (322). Still loads of people miss the fact that aversion from responsibility is just temporary and not everyone can just walk away from what they have done. In many cases, what follow the behavior are real-life consequences. Ironically, the savvy hackers took advantage of the fact that people are responsible for what they have done, that people should be fined!
Dissociative anonymity was empowered by the second factor - minimization of status and authority. Suler explains that on the internet everyone starts off on a level playing field (324) and what mostly determines the influence on other is one’s skiil in communicating… and technical know-how (324). Since everyone was equal on the internet, since there was no strong, apparent (legitimate) police authority being exercised, it was much easier for them to pose as and act like federal police with just a couple of savvy know-hows, ransomware and police-like administrative skills. Literally they could’ve been anyone, anything they wanted to be because no practical authority worked nor kept an eye on their process until they committed crime.
People do weird, unethical, disgusting stuff online. The most interesting part of this case was that the criminals knew that people do weird, unethical disgusting stuff online and took advantage of it in a weird, unethical and disgusting way.
- Juyoung Gemma Jeon
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