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The Computer as an Instrument of the Crime

The Computer as an Instrument of the Crime
There are various types of information attack threaten the United States and its citizens. Nevertheless, I think that the computer as an instrument or instrumentality of the crime is the type of information attack with the greatest threat to the United States and its citizens. I believe it is the greatest because of what it entails. In the common law, instrumentality is the diversion of lawfully possessed items, that is, instruments, to facilitate the committing of a crime. In this type of information attack, the processes of the computers, instead of the contents of the files, promote the crime (Carter, n.d.).
In this category, a criminal introduces a code or programming instructions to manipulate the analytical processes of a computer. Crimes of this type of information attack include the fraudulent use of ATM accounts and cards, money theft from the accruals, the transfer or conversion of accounts, fraud on credit cards, fraud from the computer transactions, such as billings, sales, and stock transfers, and fraud on telecommunications. An example of this type of information attack is the growing issue of people using the charges of electronic billing and cellular phones to other customers (Taylor, 2006). In these attacks, the offenders can obtain the identification codes of cellular billing using various scanning devices that are small parabolic antennas connected to the portable computers, which facilitate the capturing and storing of account numbers that the cellular phones transmit. For this reason, this type of information attack poses the greatest threat because it can freeze the financial resources of the people. For this reason, it can paralyze the entire economic system by reducing the purchasing power of the consumers.

References

Carter, D. L. (n.d.). Computer Crime: How Techno-Criminals Operate. Retrieved from http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cri14.htm
Taylor, R. W. (2006). Digital crime and digital terrorism (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.