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Digital Drift and the Criminal Interaction Order
Introduction
This paper suggests the need analytically to develop a ‘criminal interaction order’ that
incorporates new means of conducting social encounters and new ways of acquiring criminal
capability through the Internet and related communication technologies such as mobile
computing (smartphones, tablets etc.). Ten years ago Ronald Clarke wrote, “The Internet has
created a completely new environment in which traditional crimes...can take new forms” as
well as creating “new opportunities for organized crimes such as money-laundering, credit
card forgery, trade in body parts and, of course, terrorism” (Clarke 2004: 55). Since then the
reach and penetration of the Internet into everyday social relations has expanded
dramatically. While there were approximately 360 million Internet users in 2000, this figure
had grown to more than 2.4 billion by 2012 (Internet World Stats 2013). In Western countries
the percentage of the population accessing the Internet in 2012 varied from 63.2% (Europe)
to 78.6% (North America). The implications of this massive social trend are yet to be fully
appreciated (Lanier 2013; Pew Research Center 2014; Schmidt and Cohen 2013).
Criminology has been slow to respond to these changes and to grasp their implications for
understanding how crime is being committed. In this paper we argue that Internet-related uses
have fundamentally reconfigured the “specific social arrangements for the accomplishment of
crime” (Cohen 1977: 110) in at least three ways: (1) weakening the bonding power of groups
(and hence loosening group boundaries); (2) expanding the range of interactions possible for
a given individual; (3) placing more power in the hands of individuals to determine how,
when, and whether they affiliate with others and take action in the world. Our focus is not on
the forms of cybercrime now taking place such as hacking and phishing (e.g. Brenner 2002;
Glenny 2011; Mann and Sutton 1998; Wall 2007). It is rather upon the ways in which these

2. 2
new technologies enable individuals to both ‘embed’ and ‘dis-embed’ themselves in a variety
of criminal activities and lifestyles off- as well as on-line. In short, the changes that concern
us, powered by the Information Age (Castells 2000), impact upon the level of individual
commitment to criminal activities and lifestyles as well as upon the degree and forms of
interdependence and reciprocity implicated in the accomplishment of crime.
This paper explores how the Internet is changing how crime is organised and committed. The
Internet can be seen as significant in two senses - first, as a unique place or set of places
facilitating new and easy encounters between individuals across space and time, and
secondly, as empowering individuals by providing in effect a proxy partner (or prosthesis) for
a wide range of activities. The greater fluidity around criminal interactions facilitated through
the Internet challenges the understanding of criminal commitments as “consistent lines of
activity” (Becker 1960: 33) or socially embedded activity. In developing the idea here of a
criminal interaction order, we recognise the necessity to re-examine our understandings of
some now well-established constructs in criminology such as the idea of criminal identities as
essentially stable, of criminal interactions as essentially network-like, and of criminal
learning depending upon face-to-face interactions over time. As social relations increasingly
consist of “mediated forms of social interaction” (Rettie 2009), it is necessary to reconsider
the terms on which interactions occur in order to understand how, where and when crime is
enacted socially. Drawing on Matza (1964; 1969) we propose the concept of digital drift to
capture some of the mediated effects of the Internet upon criminal commitments, particularly
his idea that drift into and out of criminal pathways can often be “accidental or
unpredictable” (Matza 1964: 29).
The balance of this paper consists of four sections. First, we examine some threads within
existing approaches to the study of criminal organisation, including network and co-

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offending, that support the inquiry embarked upon in this paper. This literature challenges us
to consider how key explanatory concepts in criminological theory relate to the Internet
context - concepts such as trust, social ties, and offender convergence settings being key to
understanding how persons interact and organise themselves for the commission of crimes.
However these strands need to be theorised with respect to the Internet, something that we
make a start upon here.
Secondly, the idea of the ‘criminal interaction order’ is introduced as a way of specifying the
key elements that we argue require greater theoretical attention in the light of widespread
public uptake and use of Internet-based communication technologies. Here we draw upon
interactionist ideas from Goffman (1963; 1982) and Matza (1964; 1969) as well as more
recent theorisations of encounters and involvements in the new media environment by
scholars such as Meyrowitz (1985; 1997) and Sheller (2004), in order to specify features of
criminal organisation that are looser and less determined in nature than many theoretical
accounts within criminology currently permit.
Thirdly, we demonstrate the appropriateness of such a conceptual turn through the
presentation of two examples: one of the ‘Lone Wolf’ phenomenon in terrorist and serious
crime cases where the Internet has played a constitutive role in the crimes committed, and the
second drawing upon the realm of paedophilia, where the Internet has altered, attenuated, and
enabled new forms of criminal affiliation. Finally, we consider what changes to the study of
criminal organisation are implied by the acceptance of our notion of the criminal interaction
order.
Current Approaches to Criminal Organisation
This section examines a number of contemporary approaches to the study of the organisation
of crime (Cohen 1977), including network analysis, gang theory, and the co-offending

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literatures, for their potential to capture and explicate features of Internet-mediated
participation in various kinds of crime. Overall these approaches tend to be overly structured
and ‘over-socialized’ (Robins 2009). They deny a role for individual choices, underestimate
the degree of contextual mobility possible, and ignore differences in the social contexts in
which decisions to commit crime are made.
A challenge to the ‘over-socialized’ understanding of criminal participation has come from
within the criminal network literature itself, which had already integrated Granovetter’s
“strength of weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) in order to reflect many of the changing contours
of organised crime (Morselli 2009). Some network scholars have begun to see the need for a
‘third generation’ approach (Klerks 2001), albeit articulated in different ways. The inclusion
of more qualitative data, including ethnographic material and insights into the meaning of
particular relationships and dealings between individual offenders, has been recognised as a
necessary supplement or correction to the graphic preoccupations of ‘second generation’
network analysis (Blaschke, Schoeneborn and Seidl 2012; Chattoe and Hamill 2005; Klerks
2001). We agree with Waring (2002) that the organisational structures around much criminal
activity are still best conceptualised as networks over other types of social organisation (e.g.
hierarchies or markets), although these concepts also remain important.
Implicit in the shift to network analysis in the understanding of crime is recognition of a
reconfiguration of physical space and group affiliations with respect to how much crime
(particularly forms of co-offending) is organised. However we want to argue even network
approaches place excessive reliance upon face-to-face encounters and/or dealings between
members of established groups, and pay insufficient regard to new forms of “technologically
mediated sociality” (Tufekci 2008: 21). These new ways of interacting and the associations
that emerge are not well captured, in our view, by current conceptions of ‘social ties’. As a

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consequence, analysts need to engage more closely with the micro-sociological dimensions of
criminality - particularly those mediated through the Internet (cf Resynansky, Falzon and
Agostino 2013).
The search for a ‘third generation’ approach within the Social Network Analysis (SNA)
community is one seeking an escape from the overly schematic understandings of social
organisation. Fu and colleagues (2013: 281) have recently noted that:
because interpersonal relations and social actions are built upon aggregated contacts, a
lack of information about contacts would essentially limit our understanding of how a
tie or network forms, sustains, and transforms.
Fu and colleagues have called for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to analysis of social interactions,
one “able to distinguish and study situational factors contact by contact, within the same ties
or relationships” [our emphasis] (2013: 281). This focus sits very well with Goffman’s (1982)
idea of the ‘interaction order’ in which social relations consist in part of interactional
possibilities and not just predictabilities. Some network scholars themselves suggest that
present approaches handle so-called ‘strong ties’ better than ‘weak ties’ – contacts with
“someone only marginally included in the current network” or “individuals whose very
existence they have forgotten” (Fu, Ho and Chen 2013: 279, quoting Granovetter 1973: 1371-
1372). Mediated communications can make when, how, and whether communications take
place very different from how these occur in face-to-face encounters (Meyrowitz 1997). In
the latter, physical co-presence implies greater accountability requirements for non-
cooperation or other forms of individual nonconformity (Mann and Sutton 1998: 223). In
short, the topography (structure) of existing network approaches based principally upon
relatively predictable and patterned face-to-face interactions is not well placed to capture the
characteristics of these new forms of virtual interaction and encounter (Robins 2009).

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In the co-offending literature, the idea of ‘place’ has been put forward by a number of
scholars as important to understanding criminal associations. Felson’s (2006) concept of the
‘offender convergence setting’ urges us to identify those places particularly significant in the
social accomplishment of crime. As demonstrated below, those convergence settings have
increasingly become virtual in nature - the Internet is a place (or space), albeit of a
deterritorialised kind, in which social encounters and interactions occur asynchronously as
well as synchronously. In conceptualising the role and indeed the complexity of the Internet,
the ready accessibility of a multitude of virtual spaces, any one of which can be quickly
entered and similarly escaped by the click of a mouse, points to the high degree of personal
mobility and relational ephemerality made possible through Internet use (McEwan and
Wellman 2013; Meyrowitz 1997). Similarly the link between routinely accessed space and
criminal opportunity in Routine Activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979) raises important
questions for criminologists interested in the digital realm (e.g. Yar 2005) about how not just
the frequency of access to those spaces and by whom, but also the forms of access (types of
presence, participation) made to those spaces (Fish, Murillo, Nguyen, Panofsky and Kelty
2011), contribute to different kinds of crime.
Co-offending also raises the issue of ‘trust’; in other words, how different kinds of social
interactions achieve a level of trust that is conducive to criminal engagement and indeed to
successful criminal enterprise. The online features of greater distance, mass connectivity, and
potential identity concealment seem likely to alter the trade-offs between “the need for
collaboration and cooperation which requires multiple links and actions” and the “need for
secrecy, control and security” (Robins 2009: 179). Similarly the concept of ‘criminal
capital’, derived from the idea of social capital (McCarthy and Hagan 2001), needs re-
specification in relation to the altered social contexts for crime brought about by
technological and cultural change. As noted already, part of the significance of the Internet is

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the proliferation of places; it is not so much a readily knowable place with a set of particular
characteristics (in short, a particular medium) but rather what Qvortrup (2006: 350) has called
a “multi-semantic system” that integrates all known media into “one converged multimedia
system.”
The Internet’s very complexity, diversity, and dynamism poses some obvious challenges to
conventional understandings of trust predicated upon the possibility of actual interactions
between relatively known or knowable individuals. Observing the distinction between
‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ criminal capital is relevant in the Internet era in which online
environments permit anonymity and information browsing without actual virtual or physical
interactions with others (Hofer and Aubert 2013). As relationships around information-
sharing increasingly replace relationships built around co-presence in a physical sense, the
ways in which the Internet bridges ‘situations’ as well as ‘individuals’ needs re-examination.
This point is examined further in the first case example discussed below.
Within Social Learning approaches (e.g. Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association), there
has been a focus on how persons come to learn and adopt criminal ways and lifestyles
through their social relationships; in short, the mechanisms and processes for the acquisition
of capability (technique) and commitment (identity, motives) by individuals. Learning
through association with criminally inclined others implies a strong socialization or
indoctrination concept whereby sustained, face-to-face contact relationships of a
teacher/student kind result in the inculcation of the wherewithal to engage in crime. Again, as
new technologies fundamentally alter the ways in which learning and indoctrination are
possible, new forms of socialisation need to be accounted for within criminological
explanations. Further, as new preferences for socialising develop that are enabled by these
communication technologies, grasping how they can be and are being used is a fundamental

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requirement for improved understanding. As Internet users become more ‘nomadic’
(Marechal, Linstead and Munro 2013), as our cases below indicate, the Internet can provide
‘involvement shields’ (Goffman 1963), nurturing and enabling individual disengagement
from shared identities and stable associations (Williams and Copes 2005). Thus, while widely
seen as enabling connection to the world, the Internet has a Janus-face. As it simultaneously
provides for the possibility of disengagement and engagement, ‘belonging’ and commitment
to shared identity groups including criminal associations (gangs, cartels, mafia groups etc.)
becomes more problematic. By potentialising the individual, learning and motivational
acquisition becomes more self-directed and less legible to others (and therefore less
predictable), increasing the likelihood of individual behaviour that is not dependent on face-
to-face ties to others (Mann and Sutton 1998).
Another lens on the changing mediation environment for crime is provided by the less
commonly examined link between ‘leisure’ activities and crime. As the Internet increasingly
occupies large amounts of people’s time for pleasure, some scholars have turned their
attention to the seductions of online games such as Second Life (e.g. Waskul and Martin
2010) and the criminogenic effects of violent online gaming (e.g. Delamere and Shaw 2006).
However there is also scope for criminologists to study how the recreational use of these
digital resources can move into facilitation of and involvement in crimes of various types,
off- as well as online (Bryce 2001). Notions of ‘play’ and ‘exploration’ familiar in the
literature of youth delinquency and cultural criminology (in particular, edgework) (e.g. Lyng
2004; also Katz 1988) are also pertinent to the virtual realm where specific technical
capabilities of the medium constitute an important part of what Katz (1988) calls the
‘foreground’ of immediate experience or the “invitational edge” between deviance and
lawfulness (Matza 1969: 147; Lofland 1969: 104). These technical features engender
playfulness and experimentation, establishing the prospects for liminality (Maratea and

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Kavanaugh 2012; Waskul and Martin 2010;) where other identities and activities can be
explored outside the constraints of face-to-face relationships.
One important thing to emphasise is the different forms of participation enabled by the
Internet. These variations, while potentially of enormous criminological significance, remain
unacceptably opaque at present. While full-blown commitment with others to online or real-
world activities can emerge from online participation, participation can also be as weak as
merely paying attention (Fish et al 2011: 163). Internet users can access information, other
resources, and ideological messages from the mainstream to the extreme without any kind of
reciprocity including disclosure of one’s identity (Bryce 2001). Different forms of ‘deviant
leisure’ are facilitated by the Internet, including online pornography and child paedophilia
sites. The freedom not to reveal one’s own identity but at the same time to seek and contact
others across the globe with similar interests are two features of this environment with
significant and largely unexplored criminogenic potential (Williams and Copes 2005).
As noted above, the Internet’s facilitation of and tolerance for diverse leisure interests
merges into the enablement of crime. Its ‘playful’, experimental aspect without direct or
legible participation arguably releases participants from moral bonds that might prove
effective in a face-to-face setting in restraining particular forms of behaviour (Mann and
Sutton 1998; Maratea and Kavanaugh 2012). However there remains with the Internet the
possibility of episodic involvement in crime or its avoidance altogether, under conditions that
can connect an individual to others if desired but that also reinforce the element of personal
choice and control. Viewed in terms of leisure activity rather than career commitment,
engaging with the Internet will often result in ‘sporadic’ and ‘opportunistic’ engagements in
deviance (Stebbins, Rojek and Sullivan 2000). This proposition is consistent with our concept
of digital drift, developed below. The Internet, as a place or set of places, can therefore be

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seen as a key technology facilitating limited forms of engagement in criminal behaviour
under the cover of, or as an extension of, mainstream leisure pursuits. Having examined how
a number of theoretical perspectives within criminology can be applied and adapted in ways
that capture some of the distinctiveness of the Internet as a medium for crime, we turn next to
some specific suggestions for explicating the relative flexibility and disorganisation of the
Internet (Yar 2005) and their potential contribution to crime.
Online Sociality and the “Criminal Interaction Order”
The dramatic uptake of the Internet over the past decade has meant that technology-mediated
changes are being felt within the constitutive elements of social relations – ‘communication’,
‘identity’, ‘privacy’ and ‘trust’ being among those directly affected. However the study of the
digital environment should not assume that interactions in this realm can be treated as
analogous to ‘real-world’ social networks, as the different communication modalities do
matter (Blaschke et al 2012). It is now possible technologically for individuals to ‘connect’
or ‘interact’ without being ‘networked’ (cf Wellman, Quan-Haase, Boase, Chen, Hampton,
Diaz and Miyata 2003). We agree with Ackland and O’Neil (2011: 181) who have noted how
“in contrast to real-world organizational networks…it is trivial to create connections between
nodes [our emphasis]”, hence “[i]t is not enough to simply conceptualise online networks as
the cyberspace counterparts of…offline organizational networks”. Resynansky et al (2013: 3)
echoing the importance of communication as a constitutive part of this Internet-based social
reality, call for “an interactional and interlocutory concept of communication which attributes
greater importance to the pragmatic rather than the representational features of language
(Riva and Galimberti 2001: 7)”. Grasping the pragmatics of Internet-mediated
communication as part of studying the changing modalities of criminal organisation,
however, remains largely unexplored until now.

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To begin this exploration, we turn to the concept of ‘encounter’ in part because it reminds us
of the contingent nature of social relations. An encounter implies a meeting between two
people, the establishment of some kind of proximity between them which enables identity
work (Ahmed 2000) and the possibility of social capital exchanges. Encounters typically bear
traces of general structural features (race, class, gender etc.) (Ahmed 2000: 119), as well as
provide opportunities to make impressions through activities during the interaction itself. For
Ahmad (2000: 8), encounters are not entirely predictable from structural features; there is
always the potential for surprise and we need to accept “the structural possibility that we may
not be able to read the bodies of others [emphasis in the original]”.
Ahmed’s comments, directed to face-to-face encounters, are even more applicable to the
realm of the Internet. The technical affordances available in this environment (use of avatars;
creation of false identities; anonymous consumption of uploaded information etc.) as well as
the cultural dispositions practised by many users of this medium (e.g. present-time
orientation; narcissism; utilitarian approach to relationships- Passini 2013) permit much more
fluidity and play in terms of the initiation of encounters. There is also the ability to construct
and amend virtual identities that lack the verification procedures available in face-to-face
encounters.
The salience of a focus upon encounters is reinforced when one considers the work of Sheller
(2004: 39), a mobilities theorist, who observed “the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled
by mobile communication technologies” and noted the “opportunities for new kinds of
publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of
newly emerging places and arenas for communication”. Significantly Sheller is interested in
the ‘absences’ as well as ‘presences’ enabled and/or constrained by the “new
technosocialities of mobility” (2004: 43). These capabilities in the individual point to the

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“possibilities for easing in and out of contingent socialities” (Sheller 2004: 49) [emphasis
added]. This fluid, gel-like quality, she argues, renders network approaches ill-suited in terms
of their ability to capture this movement and lack of fixity. At the level of the individual,
network approaches have made an incorrect assumption: “People themselves are not simply
stationary nodes in a network, but are flexible constellations of identities-on-the-move”
(Sheller 2004: 49). We need to better recognise, she argues, how new technologies such as
the Internet enable structural slippage and can render social interactions surprising in unique
and meaningful ways. This stance, quite distinct from other theories of social organisation,
is what we argue is needed in making sense of the Internet in relation to the social
organisation of crime.
This line of thought problematises the concept of a commitment to a group or particular
activity and further begs questions about the nature of participation - what does it mean to
participate in something through the Internet? Sheller observes within contemporary social
orders a pattern of floating commitments, of non-commitment as well as commitment, or to
revert to Goffman, not just ‘involvements’ (Goffman 1963) - whether they be primary or
secondary, main or side - but of intermittent or unpredictable moments of the ‘absence of
involvement’. In part this lack of commitment can be linked to the movement between
different cultural identities and sites, allowing ‘drift’ in Matza’s (1964: 28) sense of the
delinquent as “casually, intermittently, and transiently involved in a pattern of illegal action”.
Drift in the digital environment emerges from the dynamic engagement between features of
the technology and the uses made of it. Various features of the Internet itself facilitate the
kinds of mobility, anonymity and distance that attenuate commitment and ensure a diversity
of interaction forms. The multiplicity of different online contexts as well as identities that the
Internet makes possible mean that one context can often be readily escaped through the

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creation of or movement to another (Meyrowitz 1997: 69). Goffman’s idea of involvement
shields (1963) is also suggestive in understanding the new environment. While Goffman used
this term to refer to ways of concealing less than full presence or engrossment in a social
situation, he in effect identifies an ‘economy of individual attention or involvement’ in social
encounters in which “the tendency to hold something of himself [sic] in reserve” (1963: 62),
is an individual capability that permits degrees of involvement and indeed disinvolvement.
How the Internet can be deployed as an involvement shield to filter and select the obligations
and commitments commonly associated with the organisation of crime is a theme explored in
the case examples below. It is a question worthy of much further investigation beyond this
paper.
In making sense of such interaction variation, Bossewitch and Sinnreich (2013: 232-234)
propose different models of “information networks” that reflect variations or degrees of
embeddedness in terms of information exchange. Their ‘off the grid’, ‘black hole’ and
‘voracious collector’ strategies fit better in our view with the picture of sporadic involvement
and drift that we are describing than the more embedded and interdependent forms they also
propose. The ‘off the grid’ strategy, as its name suggests, points to the possibility of an
individual disconnecting from communication networks altogether, while the ‘black hole’
strategy refers to the deliberate collection by someone of information from others while
withholding information about themselves or that is in their possession. The ‘voracious
collector’, on the other hand, seeks to maintain consistent inward information flows, but does
so with some (often limited) outward engagement. Applied to the realm of crime, these
concepts contribute to a terminology for describing different forms of communicative action
enabled by the Internet, as the case examples below demonstrate.
As well as providing a set of contexts, the Internet also operates as a readily accessible

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archive of information and ideas that can both motivate and guide action (Pew Research
Center 2014: 41). Coming to appreciate that certain criminal actions are “relatively easy to
do” (Matza 1964: 184) implies the analytical need to identify how knowledge is acquired that
enables criminal behaviour to occur as well the sources of reassurance that one will not be
caught. How the Internet contributes to these social processes is fundamental to our inquiry.
In ideological terms, its role as a source of ‘techniques of neutralization’ is increasingly
evident and relatively straightforward, the Internet substituting in effect as a proxy provider
of ideas and information (Webber and Yip 2012). However one of the critical questions to be
faced here, as with other contexts in which neutralizations are generally accessible, is why
some people will take them up in order to justify or excuse criminal acts while others will
not. Answering this question will require the systematic study of online interactions with
different materials and partners.
Cases
The Lone Wolf Terrorist in Cyberspace
The empowerment of individuals through the Internet is a familiar theme (e.g. Wellman et al
2003). This point applies to the world of Internet-mediated crime generally, including
cybercrime (Glenny 2011; Wall 2007). Our proposition , however, is that individuals are not
inevitably ‘networked’ through the Internet and that many are involved in different kinds of
partial or incompletely developed connection with others. There is no doubt that recruitment,
training, exhortation, and instruction of individuals for committing terrorist acts depends
increasingly upon the mediation of the Internet and social media (Kennedy and Weimann
2011; Michael 2013; Spaaij 2010; Weimann 2012). However given its general or at least
ready availability on the Internet, the material promoting this kind of activity remains visible
to the curious as well as to the more committed.

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While the Internet has facilitated jihadism by enabling individuals to connect with other like-
minded individuals to commit terrorist acts (Kennedy and Weimann 2011), this is not the
only way in which the Internet mediates terrorist actions. The past few years have seen a
“noticeable spike [in lone wolf terrorism] with the onset of the Internet age” (Feldman 2013:
270). Retiring FBI director Robert Mueller stated in August 2013 that “‘lone wolf’ terrorists,
like the men accused of carrying out the Boston and Fort Hood attacks” count among the
most significant security threats to the US due to their online radicalization and training
making them more difficult to identify and disrupt (Kenber 2013). Successful disruption of
terrorist groups since 9/11 has resulted in terrorist organisations using the Internet to
encourage individuals to commit terrorist actions either alone or in small groups, what
Sageman (2011) has called ‘leaderless jihad’. Similarly, in the aftermath of the 2009 Fort
Hood shooting involving Nidal Hasan, a lone disgruntled Army psychiatrist, terrorism
scholar Bruce Hoffman noted that al-Qaeda now seeks “to empower and motivate individuals
to commit acts of violence completely outside any terrorist chain of command” (quoted in
Weimann 2012: 76). In the Hasan example, investigations subsequently revealed that while
it appears clear that he acted alone in planning and committing the mass shooting of US army
personnel and a civilian, he had exchanged email messages with Yemen-based radical cleric
Anwar al-Awlaki on several occasions prior to the shooting (Spaaij 2010: 857; Weimann
2012: 84).
Spaaij (2010: 856) defines the term ‘lone wolf terrorism’ in the following way:
[It] involves terrorist attacks carried out by persons who (a) operate individually, (b)
do not belong to an organized terrorist group or network, and (c) whose modi
operandi are conceived and directed by the individual without any direct outside
command or hierarchy.

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Though committing the acts alone, scholars point to the range of resources available to the
lone wolf on the Internet. They tend, drawing upon social capital language, to be either
informational (bridging) or ideological in nature (bonding; neutralizations). The availability
of both kinds of resources on the Internet produces a high degree of operating autonomy for
individuals (Feldman 2013; Striegher 2013). Those who draw on the Internet for either or
both resources without interacting online with others provide examples of the ‘off the radar’
model offered by Bossewitch and Sinnreich (2013). Their participation is limited in scope.
Their real identities often remain hidden. They are termed ‘lurkers’ pejoratively by some
online participants and new media scholars (Crawford 2011; Edelman 2013). In Hasan’s case,
while he is accepted to have acted alone, he had previously sought advice on ideological
matters through online interactions with a religious authority figure.
In the case of terrorists acting alone or in groups, the Internet provides abundant ‘techniques
of neutralization’ (Sykes and Matza 1957) that can be acquired and absorbed through self-
instruction (or self-indoctrination) (Porter and Kebbell 2010). Ideologies such as white
supremacy, Islamism, nationalism/separatism and anti-abortionism have provided such
‘cover’ in a range of cases (Spaaij 2010). Weimann (2012) points to the influence in several
known cases of the al-Qaeda linked e-magazine, Inspire, as well as to the availability of
online training manuals and video materials. According to Weimann (2012: 80), the role of
Inspire was central to the radicalization and planning activities of Jose Pimental, a native of
the Dominican Republic arrested for planning a series of attacks against targets in the US
states of New York and New Jersey. The Internet in this instance can be seen to have
provided a convenient one-stop-shop for this ‘do it yourself’ terrorist. Not only could he
access justifications supportive of his planned actions in this way, he could also find
instructions on how to build pipe bombs.

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Even for so-called ‘lurkers’ or ‘listeners’ (Crawford 2011: 66), those who remain curious
rather than deeply committed, the Internet provides a medium for “everyday listening online
that can generate powerful bonds of social intimacy and connectedness” without reciprocal
communication or even awareness on the part of the speaker of the quarters in which they are
being heard. Such a sense of connection or indeed just awareness of grievances does not lead
of itself to actual commission of terrorist acts. The Internet permits knowing abstinence as
well as wilful commitment. In the latter case however the Internet conceivably acts as a
‘digital partner’ by providing endorsement and information to an individual who remains
otherwise disengaged from a ‘real world’ commitment to such activity.
Encountering Paedophilia Online
The same Internet affordances available to potential terrorists similarly empower the would-
be or actual online paedophile. But as in the case of those interested in jihadism online, it is
important to retain the distinction between the curious and the committed, as well as between
different degrees of commitment shown by individuals to online sexual interests including
paedophilia. In this case, the “invitational edge” between the realm of online leisure and
Internet-facilitated illegal behaviour is particularly apparent.
Those who seek paedophilia materials online are simply one part of an apparently large scale
phenomenon of online accessing of sexual material, including pornography. The growing
percentage of Internet traffic that is video based reflects in part the rapidly expanding adult
video market (Tyson, Elkhatib, Sastry and Uhlig 2013), much of which of course is legal. In
one recent study, it was reported that one adult video website had over 111 million access
requests in a single three day period (Tyson et al 2013). In this study, many of those
accessing the sites were noted to be generalised browsers rather than highly-directed
searchers of particular content. While there is data on traffic flow on to such sites, it remains

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the case that “we lack even a basic understanding of how users interact with these services”
(Tyson et al 2013: 1). Understanding such interactions in an illicit context (e.g. the accessing
of paedophilic materials) becomes even more challenging but also crucial.
In the pre-Internet era (i.e. pre-1989), encounters between paedophiles tended to be localised,
isolated, secretive, and characterised by incredibly high levels of trust (and discretion)
amongst actors (Quinn and Forsyth 2005). The advent of the Internet created unprecedented
opportunity for networking and initiating new potential encounters with other like minded
persons. Paedophiles use a varied range of Internet services to encounter, engage and
participate in paedophilic activities. Web forums, newsgroups, chat rooms, streaming services
and file sharing sites have all been used for the purpose of distributing pornographic or other
sexual materials (e.g. stories, comics, images, videos) (see Durkin 1997; Jenkins 2001;
Quayle and Taylor 2002), as a means of raising awareness, providing/seeking support, and as
a tool to aid in identifying, grooming, and exploiting potential victims for sexual contact in
both online and offline settings (Jenkins 2001; Webb, Craissati and Keen 2007).
As a subset of wider interests in sexual material online, the case of online paedophilia is thus
an apt example of how the Internet creates new, virtually unlimited opportunities for
connection. It represents a “system whose legitimate purpose is to benefit and empower users
by lowering the barriers to the creation and distribution of a variety of content around the
world” (Akdeniz 2002: 223). By archiving a wide range of legal as well as illegal sexually
explicit material accessible through the same ‘search engine,’ the Internet renders the line or
edge separating the two realms less distinct. Moreover the fact that the Internet encourages
solitary activity means that difficulties of negotiating that line will often be undertaken
alone. In this sense the threshold to entry into criminality becomes less substantial and very
easy to negotiate. Furthermore the Internet makes the pursuit of both kinds of online sexual

19. 19
interest much easier by rendering illegal and compromising material readily available with
only a few clicks of a mouse, “whet[ting] the appetite of the curious and introduc[ing] them
to sophisticated versions of its rationalization systems before actually participating in the act”
(Quinn and Forsyth 2005: 198). Given the excitement factor, the ‘invitational edge’ (Matza
1969) - the ready source of excitement just an Internet click away - is immense, setting the
scene for many new and ‘curious’ actors to drift in and out of self-serving encounters,
shifting between different kinds and forms of involvement (Holt, Blevins and Burkert 2010).
Given the relative ease with which this can happen, it seems highly probable that many such
‘drifting’ individuals will not fit with popular conceptions of the paedophile as some kind of
hard-wired, incorrigible deviant seeking the support and company of other like-minded
individuals.
The ready encounter with the ‘edge’ in this environment can be illustrated by the following
example. Jenkin’s (2001: 23) research chronicling paedophilia newsgroups details several
instances of such encounters - citing one illustrative post by user Dad who, in 1999,
described the empowering, even titillating contingencies afforded through his experiences on
the Internet:
Dad: I remember one day I done a search for teen girls on the net, I expected to find
girls of 18+, ye [sic] know the usual. But this one time I found a girl-love site... it was
wonderful. One girl in particular, Laika, the ‘Internet Princess’. Then I started to
search for loli on the various search engines and got the usual rubbish, pay sites and
misleading links, soon I found out about news [newsgroups] and went from there, that
was three years ago...If it wasn’t for the Internet I would have never known. I think as
the Internet grows, more people will find out their sexual desires just as I did.
Given the risks associated with being exposed as a paedophile, establishing trust in other

20. 20
participants has become a crucial survival skill (Holt et al 2010). The Internet has served such
persons well by offering devices providing individual security against exposure and law
enforcement actions. The technical affordances that allow concealment of identity provide
ready ‘involvement shields’ against identifiable forms of participation, thus masking the
identities, behaviours, and activities of paedophiles from both law enforcement agents and
societal stigmatization more generally (Durkin and Bryant 1999; Quinn and Forsyth 2005).
Users of Web forums adopt screen names and avatars to conceal their true identities.
Knowing that law enforcement agencies also trawl through threads and posts (they are often
publically accessible through a simple Google search), users alter the details of their
encounters to avoid detection (Holt et al 2010). They also frequently encrypt sexual
materials, and connect to the Internet via virtual private networks (VPNs) to mask their
Internet Service Provider information. Negotiating this realm requires supplementary
knowledge and resources to find, pay for, and access password protected (and often carefully
camouflaged) services/web sites (Quinn and Forsyth 2005). These of course are the skills of
the committed rather than the merely curious. In many instances these skills of concealed
participation can themselves be acquired through the same medium, without direct or
mediated encounters with other online participants. However by this point the ‘edge’ has long
before been crossed.
Implications: Drifting digitally in and out of criminal encounters
We have seen that the advent of communications technologies such as the Internet has not
only increased networking opportunities and information sharing. It has also expanded the
conditions that enable crime-related activities to be carried out by individuals in private
settings or semi-private settings (i.e. not carried out in the presence of others, or via face-to-
face connections). Technology can in effect substitute for other kinds of criminal

21. 21
associations. Increasingly, “machines function as cognitive prostheses, and communication
media inch ever closer to approximating the phenomenology of lived experience [emphasis
added]” (Bossewitch and Sinnreich 2013: 226). The abundance of information and the ready
access to it in the hands of masses of people has profoundly changed the information and
communication architecture. This architecture, particularly in light of the Internet’s
complexity, can be said to be ‘messy’ (Bell and Dourish 2007) or ‘disorganised’ (Yar 2005),
consisting partly of ‘seams’, features of the technology that depend upon on active agency to
overcome their limitations as means of communication.
Again, these conditions are significant for individual empowerment. For example, Barkhuus
and Polichar (2010) observed one of their subjects deciding to use his mobile device only at
night to check emails so as to limit their impact on his work during office hours. These
technologically enabled individual choices alter the distribution of information and how
knowledge is ultimately acquired and used. They not only break old monopolies over
information but also reconfigure (and thus redefine) the very nature of social relations as
being something far more fluid (Sheller 2004). Criminal connections and ties become less
binding as encounters go virtual. The Internet has substantially reconfigured the sources as
well as the flows of criminal resource acquisition (skills, motivations etc.).
An implication of both the lone wolf and the online paedophile cases is the need to more
closely examine the nature (variety, frequency, intensity) of interactions with online
resources and sites (Tyson et al 2013). It is clear that participation online can take a wide
variety of forms, with different criminogenic implications. Licoppe and Inada’s (2012: 2767)
study of a gaming community underline the different degrees of participation that are enabled
by the combination of virtual and actual presence opportunities - what they refer to as
“layered participation”. In their category of the ‘timid encounter’ we find a form of Internet-

22. 22
mediated engagement reflecting the potentially limited dimensionality of encounters in the
mediated hands of online players. These players, they note, “exploit the ‘evidential
boundaries’ of the situation in order to maintain a separation between game and co-present
encounters” (Licoppe and Inanda 2012: 2765). In such cases, there is likely to be varying
degrees of emotional attachment associated with participation, from detachment to deep
investment. The ability of players in this context to negotiate and reinforce this boundary is
precisely what we argue is indicative of ‘digital drift’.
The idea of the criminal interaction order can be used to open up conceptually not only the
diversity of online participatory forms but also their fleeting, often timid and fluid, forms.
Whereas Goffman’s notion depended upon the face-to-face encounter, co-presence in a
physical sense is not required for online encounters to occur and for those encounters to
subsequently shape behaviour. The absence of a physical co-presence requirement implies a
different, in all likelihood reduced, set of “promissory, evidential” obligations between two
persons arising from an encounter (Goffman 1982: 3). The choice not to identify oneself to
others, and the control that can be exercised in terms of when and how one engages with
others online is empowering in criminogenic terms at the individual level.
The greater selectivity around engagement with others inevitably also calls into question
other features of the interaction order - a “large base of shared cognitive presuppositions, if
not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints” (Goffman 1982: 5). In such an
environment, isolated offenders may use such technologies to glean information about
potential targets or methods at the same time as exploiting other features (e.g. use of avatars)
serving as involvement shields, thereby avoiding disclosure of their identity and submission
to group norms. In doing so, they may or may not share many of the cognitive assumptions of
those whose online material is being accessed. The concept of the ‘encounter’ (or contact)

23. 23
rather than ‘link’ or ‘connection’ (with their connotations of ongoing relationship) is key in
teasing out the range of involvements enabled by the Internet. Such variations in degrees and
forms of involvement have been noted in a recent study of a hacking community (Decary-
Hetu, Morselli and Leman-Langlois 2012) but more such studies are needed.
Our two examples (lone wolf terrorism, online paedophilia) illustrate in part Goffman’s
notion of ‘loose-coupling’ - “non-exclusive linkage[s]... between interactional practices and
social structures” (Goffman 1982: 11). Our conception of the criminal interaction order
envisages that individuals can gain access to criminal associations, networks and resources in
ways that see them drift in (and out) of related illicit activities facilitated by the medium of
the Internet itself. The high degree of social penetration of Internet access and its use for
leisure and entertainment purposes points to the need to focus more upon the ‘drift’ element
in Internet-mediated forms of criminality. Interactions can be likened at times to a ‘viscous
liquid’ ebbing at times away from as well as towards and into criminal activities (Sheller
2004). However we accept the need for greater theoretical and empirical work if we are to
refine our grasp of the ‘mechanisms’ that enable digital drift to occur (cf Hindelang 1970). In
order to better appreciate the empowering aspects of the Internet, there is the need to identify
more fully the range of online behaviours and potentialities that can (but need not
necessarily) result subsequently in criminal behaviour.
What is urgently needed is to expand our appreciation of the Internet as a set of social spaces
or virtual places for encounters, remembering its many diverse dimensions, meanings and
uses. While its principal role is often, as the cases have shown, informational, it also enables
forms of self-curation (e.g. Facebook pages with photos, personal details etc.) and the pursuit
of various identity-related interests (hobbies, games, titillation). While criminologists have
tended to focus extensively upon ‘bad guys,’ those whose criminality is unambiguous and

24. 24
reflective of serious social and individual commitments, the Internet introduces a huge range
of potential ‘bad guys’ as well as those who move in and out of doing ‘bad things’ (Pew
Research Center 2014: 43). The future of the Internet, Oscar Gandy suggests, includes not
just the facilitation and amplification of feelings of loss and abuse but also, as the first case
above demonstrated, the “sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist,
and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust” (Pew Research Center 2014:
9). Until we study and know much more about the nature of interactions in the Internet era, it
will remain the case that the “number of people acting on information obtained from [the
Internet] is completely unknown” (Mann and Sutton 1998: 223). In the absence of such
knowledge, the challenges for crime reduction and prevention in the Internet era will remain
substantial.
Conclusion
On-line and off-line activities are increasingly impossible to distinguish. To resort to the
Internet is not the equal of physical retreatism or disengagement from the world. As Internet
access becomes the norm in many parts of the world, understanding the implications of mass
access for the organisation and commission of crime becomes an important task for
criminologists. We have argued that the Internet has fundamentally altered the “specific
social arrangements for the accomplishment of crime” (Cohen 1977: 110), in particular by
enabling individuals to more readily act ‘alone’ without dependence on others as co-offenders
or as face-to-face coaches in crime.
As we have shown, the Internet increasingly substitutes for other interaction partners, acting
as a source of normative as well as “cognitive prostheses” (Bossewitch and Sinnreich 2013).
The Internet’s relative empowerment of individuals (Schmidt and Cohen 2013) has meant
that individuals can more readily engage now in “asymmetrical, non-transparent information

25. 25
gathering” practices (Andrejevic 2006: 398) for a variety of ends. These ends may include
serious criminal activities or conversely the facilitation of innocuous, pleasurable, even
benign purposes. Often these activities take the form of tentative, even timid, encounters
which may or may not lead to crime in which the “wider sense of global sharing” may lead
individuals “simultaneously to a retreat from traditional groupings to the boundaries of [their]
own idiosyncrasies” (Meyrowitz 1997: 68). These features are constitutive elements of what
we are calling digital drift.
Understanding digital drift much better is essential if we are to devise ways of encouraging
pro-social and discouraging anti-social uses of the Internet. Our contribution to this process is
only an initiation. As noted, the swelling global tide of individuals with Internet access
makes this objective an urgent and critical one. One step in this direction is accepting the
need to recast some of the overly-social accounts of criminal entry and commitment by
returning to the study of individual encounters (or interactions) with the Internet as well as
with other individuals. The proposal of a criminal interaction order, one that is encounter
based and that can engage with the Internet as a source as well as facilitator of encounters,
raises the potential for further development of the idea of a spectrum of criminal interaction
forms that includes human-computer interactions along with different kinds of digitally
mediated relations.

26. 26
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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors.