Resumen de Comment: Virtual neighborhood watch: Open source software and community policing against cybercrime
Cybercrime-crime committed through the use of a computer-is a real and growing problem that costs governments, businesses, and individual computer users millions of dollars annually and that facilitates many of the same crimes committed in realspace, such as identity theft and the trafficking of child pornography, only on a larger scale. However, the current strategies deployed by law enforcement to combat cybercrime have proven ineffective. Borne out of traditional notions of criminal behavior, these strategies and tactics are often ill-suited to prevent or punish cybercrime, which often defies the traditional notions of criminal behavior bounded by the corporeal world such as scale and proximity. This Comment argues that a more effective methodology in the fight against cybercrime is to develop a model of community policing, in which the power to deter and prevent cybercrime is divested into the hands of individual computer users. One such strategy for achieving effective community policing against cybercrime is through the increased use of open-source software, software in which users are given access to the underlying source code and may make modifications to that source code in order to ameliorate vulnerabilities that may enable cybercrime. This Comment looks at the development of traditional community policing strategies and argues that the increased use of open source softwarespurned by greater involvement by government and corporations-may be a more effective technique in the fight against cybercrime.
