Deskilling Computer Crime: Constructing a Pervasive Threat in 1980s US

The adoption of computers in a variety of business and commercial institutions throughout the 1970s created a new tension between managers and the skilled system admin. Executives worried that the savvy insider could wreak havoc on their computerized system and remain undetected. But in the 1980s, the figure of the computer criminal transformed into a threat that was characterized by belonging to a uniquely positioned professional class, but through a mundane pervasiveness. This paper looks at the transformation of the regulatory and cultural understandings of computer crime in two sites—the Computer Crime Case Files, collected by SRI researcher and long-time computer crime prevention advocate Donn B. Parker, who worked to expand the definition of computer-related criminal activity, and the technology assessment of reprographic technology, commissioned by the Department of the Treasury, which argued that electronic tools would transform banknote counterfeiting from a crime of skill to a crime of opportunity. The expected availability of computers and consumer electronics in the coming decade unfolded alongside an expanded view of who could become a computer criminal and what constituted criminal activity.