Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Cecilie Jenssen's Assignment #1


Assignment 2 - Analysis of an online crime
By: Cecilie G. Jenssen

According to hackernews.com, FBI recently arrested a 19 – year – old college student from Temecula, California called Jared James Abrahams for sextortion. Abrahams had been hacking the webcams of young women, among them reigning Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf. He had been hacking the webcams to extort nude photos and videos of the girls, and had in some cases even forced the young women to strip. He is now being accused of hacking and charged with extortion, which could send him to federal prison for up to two years. This year in June, Abrahams admitted the things he had done, and said that he had 30 to 40 “slave computers”, or other people’s electronic devices he controlled. 



I think that the reason for this cybercrime can be explained by addressing it to the disinhibiton of dissociative imagination. Consciously or unconsciously, people may feel that the imaginary characters they “created” exist in a different space, that one’s online persona along with the online others live in an make-believe dimension, separate and apart from the demands and responsibilities of the real world.
I think that Abraham hacked the webcams of the young women to act out one of his fantasies. He might have thought that his fantasies couldn’t come true in real life, and therefore decided to create a fantasy world where he could control the lives of several young women at the same time. He may also have thought that by blackmailing the young women, he could force them to become his girlfriends, which might have been his dream from the beginning.

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