Li – Cyber Crime and Legal Countermeasures: A Historical Analysis © 2017 International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. Under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 196 Copyright © 2017 International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences (IJCJS) – Official Journal of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology (SASCV) - Publisher & Editor-in-Chief – K. Jaishankar ISSN: 0973-5089 July – December 2017. Vol. 12 (2): 196–207. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1034658 / IJCJS is a Diamond Open Access (Authors / Readers No Pay Journal). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons HTUAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) LicenseUTH, Twhich permits unrestricted non-commercial useT, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cyber Crime and Legal Countermeasures: A Historical Analysis Johannes Xingan Li 1 Tallinn University, Estonia Abstract This article reviews the historical development of cyber crime and legal countermeasures. The article divides the process into four stages and concludes that cyber criminal phenomena have developed almost synchronously with Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Cyber crimes are in a process of accelerating development and are becoming gradually routinized. Notably, the electronic divide thus results in cyber crime divide. The basic conclusion is that criminal resources decide the amount of crime, while judicial resources decide the deterrence. When the balance is reached between criminal resources and judicial resources in the long term, the criminal phenomena will be saturated at an equilibrium point. ________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Cyber crime, History, Deterrence, Legislation, Law enforcement, Criminal justice, Social control. Introduction The computer was an invention that people could not imagine until it was clear what it happened to be. Before the digital computer had been invented, Thomas Watson, the former chairperson of IBM predicted in 1943 “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Although different answers to questions “what exactly is a computer?” and “how many generations of computers have been developed?” are still running parallel, it is widely accepted that the first electronic digital computer was invented in the 1940s, in the final years of World War II (Hamilton, 1973, p. 82). The more notable example is the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), invented in the U.S. in 1946 and since then, computer technology has experienced several generations. Along with the continuous development of information technology, computer crime may, in principle, have been taking place since the very invention of the computer, but at that time, it neither became a significant problem nor caused great concern. Meanwhile, the development of computer crime should have kept pace with computer technology. The computer developed from a calculator to a word processor to a multimedia device. Besides the research on the history of ICT (Cortada, 2002), the history of the computer (Allan, 2001; Kuck, 1978, pp. 52-72); the history of the Internet (Okin, 2004) or of online information services (Bourne & Hahn 2004), and history of computer ethics (Bynum, 2001), scholars have also explored the history of cyber crime (Overill, 1998), and 1 Associate Professor of International Law, School of Governance, Law and Society, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia. E-mail: xingan.li@tlu.ee