Criminologias cyber : o que é propriamente crime no ciberespaço

Abstract

Linked to the Violence, Crime and Public Security research line of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul’s Graduation Program in Criminal Sciences, this thesis analyzes the cyberspace’s architecture and the violations structured and conditioned by this new technology, questioning what is properly cyber about cybercrimes. The first part of the thesis describes, in broad lines, the different perspectives of the debate on the (dis)continuity of traditional criminologies, inquiring the need of alternative criminologies for the cyber crimes, deviations and threats. Therefore, and based on various intellectual resources, factual and philosophical assumptions are presented allowing a new proposition of criminological definition and criteria. From this, the thesis takes on the argument that the development of a new and distinct social environment, cyberspace, with its own ontological and epistemological structures, forms of interactions, functions and possibilities, enabled the emergence of unprecedented criminal phenomenologies, and that the latter require, what has been conventionally called, cyber-criminologies. Once this thesis has as object the study of crimes, deviations and threats developed from, and conditioned by, a new environment (cyberspace), the second chapter is dedicated to the criminological theories that were focused on space when analyzing the criminal phenomena and it explains two fundamental matters of cyberspace: both its neutrality and architecture. The third chapter explains how some traditional criminological theories on the etiology of deviant behavior are adaptable to the cyber context, though it is emphasized the need of a reconfiguration of individual actors into actants, making possible that new ways of understanding technical assemblages of humans/objects are developed. Lastly, and to undergird the thesis’ main argument, a cybercrimes’ generational taxonomy is presented, followed by explanations and critics, enabling then a clearer and more practical comprehension of cybercrimes’ motives, forms and impacts.