Computer-Based Crime Research Paper

Computer-Based Crime

The illegal site I reviewed for this assignment is www.howtogrowmarijuana.com. This site covers virtually all aspects of marijuana growing -- which is an illegal activity because marijuana is widely outlawed in the United States. However, there are some states in which individuals can legally consume marijuana for medicinal purposes. In these states and others there exists the potential for businesses to legally supply this substance to people.

There is a large degree of transparency in this particular web site. It was the first result to appear with a Yahoo search for "How to grow marijuana." As the tile of the site suggests, it discusses many different facets of growing marijuana and stratifies this process according to location (indoor or outdoors), various strains of marijuana including seeds (No author, 2014), irrigation and growth systems involving hydroponics, and other germane equipment types such as the expensive lights used to assist marijuana growth. There are also a host of other valuable resources such as links to additional sites that provide information about marijuana growing and its paraphernalia. Additional topics covered including growing this plant in boxes and in tents, while there is also a community forum with which visitors can interact with one another and obtain further information. This site is extremely open and transparent. In addition to getting good results from search engines, it also leverages videos from Youtube and sells books and other resources related to growing marijuana. It is not attempting to hide any aspect of its business.

It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly should be done about this site for the simple fact that there are some states in which people can legally grow this substance for medical purposes. Therefore, sites such as this one and others are actually providing critical resources and knowledge to people who are in actuality assisting the health industry. Nonetheless, the site is accessible to people in locations in which medical marijuana is not legalized, and they can still view it and utilize the information contained within it for illegal purposes.Subsequently, the ideal solution to this quandary is that those in states without legalized medical marijuana should be punished for visiting it by the Drug Enforcement Agency and the National Security Association, especially since the latter has access to data from internet users (Faris, 2013).

Part II

The legitimate site that I have chosen to explore for this assignment is Craigslist. This is a very popular and widely used site for a variety of purposes. Essentially, Craigslist functions as a medium to bring people together to effectively broker different transactions. The way the site works is people who are looking for someone else to provide a product or a service post advertisements for the specific things they are looking for. People who are seeking opportunities to supply goods or services can visit this site and respond to advertisements, and then discuss the process of assenting with the desires of the first party in a way that is mutually beneficial to both people. Legitimately, Craigslist is used for a variety of purposes such as the buying and selling of cars, the purchasing and renting of property, as well as the hiring of individuals to work for jobs. There are even personal ads on Craigslist where people can legitimately find mates, friends, or people to fulfill other roles in their lives.

Nonetheless, it is valuable to realize that nearly all of the important legitimate uses of Craigslist have the potential to be exploited by criminals for illicit purposes. Like many other applications of the internet, there always exists the potential for misrepresentation and fraudulent behavior -- either on the part of the person posting the ad or on the part of the person responding to it. In most of….....