This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Mary Aiken is a cybercrime expert. Having studied online sex offenders, self-harmers and human traffickers, the Irish psychologist heads the CyberPsychology Research Centre at Dublin's Royal College of Surgeons, where scientists study how technology distorts human behaviour. Her work has caught the eye of TV crime franchise CSI -- this year, CSI: Cyber will have Patricia Arquette playing a cyber psychologist heading up an FBI unit based on Aiken's real-life work. "The same way CSI helped the world to understand forensic crime, CSI: Cyber will do that for cyber-psychology," Aiken says. "Some people still see technology as merely mediating human behaviour, but we're talking about an immersive, disinhibiting environment that has the capacity to fundamentally alter behaviour."
As part of her work, Aiken advises Interpol on child protection, Europol on organised crime and the White House on human trafficking. CSI producers got in touch after hearing about her White House project, in which she presented data with a team of MIT network scientists to show how image-recognition technology could identify profiles on classified sites being used for human trafficking. "The problem is that we have a needle in the haystack in terms of criminal behaviour online," Aiken says. "We need to be better at making sense of that data."
Aiken says the long-term aim is to use the psychology behind destructive online behaviour to prevent it. The research she is overseeing should help us better understand what makes certain people vulnerable online, and may even steer some potential cyber-menaces on to the right track. "I'm working on a project with Interpol at the moment looking at youth risk-taking online," she says. "We know the pathway into criminal behaviour for youths in the real world: the wrong family, home, street, etc, but we don't know much about the pathway into cybercrime. That's what we need to shed light on."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
