Sarah Thatcher

Working Title:

Public policy and the social construction of cyberterror: the hunt for the paper tiger

Abstract:

The social construction of the computer hacker as dangerous criminal or even terrorist has serious implications for public policy, human rights and civil liberties. In the current climate of “counter-terrorism at any cost” grave infringements of civil liberties would seem easily justified in the name of national security.
It therefore becomes crucial to investigate systematically the foundations for social perceptions of the so-called “cyberterrorist”. The image of the hacker as dangerous criminal or terrorist, so beloved of the press and promoted tirelessly by the deep pockets of the information security industry, is critically misleading in this respect. My study seeks to pick up where others have left off, tracing the image of the computer hacker as it is transformed from “dangerous criminal” to “cyberterrorist”. The study will consider this image as it is presented in the national press, how this affects thinking and policy-making in government and, finally, how it translates into the law of England and Wales.
This is a multi-disciplinary study based on an interpretive epistemology. The theory of moral panic from the reference discipline of sociology is used as a framework for the content analysis of a sample of UK press articles on cyberterrorism. Parliamentary materials are examined separately, using a similar approach.
The expected contributions of this study include: a deeper understanding of the dialectic between national newspaper coverage and public policy on the issue of cyberterrorism; consideration of how a better basis for legislation and regulation might be defined or constructed; and an analysis of how a sociological theory of mass behaviour might be an appropriate tool for the examination of socio-cultural questions relating to information systems.