Handbook of Internet Crime.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Maurashat, Alana
• Date: 01 August 2010

Handbook of Internet Crime

Edited by Yvonne Jewkes and Majid Yar

Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2010

This book produced over 650 pages of current research and writing on topical areas of cybercrime. Governments are focusing much attention on this area. The United States, the United Kingdom and Australian governments each announced major cyber security strategies in 2009. (1) In April 2010, the Australian government announced that Australia will accede to the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime. (2) Some statistics suggest cybercrime has surpassed the profits of the global drug trade, reaching over 100 billion dollars per year. (3) Cybercrime is a booming business yet the topic has neither attracted the volume or level of scholarship as other areas of crime.

This book is essentially a book from the 'ologies' with many of the chapters written by criminologists, sociologists and psychologists, with some chapters written by lawyers and law scholars. The book's core strength is its wide range both in topics and contributors. It brings together leading scholars in the cybercrime foray. I would consider the book to be an essential reference for criminologists working in the field of cybercrime. While not essential for other disciplines such as law, the book remains a valuable source for looking beyond black-letter issues and into some of the more systemic problems surrounding cybercrime.

I found most of the articles in this book to be useful. Some were of exceptional quality. These were: 'Child Pornography' by Ethel Quayle, 'Online Surveillance and Personal Liberty' by Michael McGuire; 'Computer Forensics and the Presentation of Evidence in Criminal Cases' by Ian Walden, and 'Intellectual Property Crime and the Internet: Cyber-Piracy and "Stealing" Informational Intangibles by David Wall and Majid Yar. These...