Digital Architecture as Crime Control
Neal Kumar Katyal · The Yale Law Journal · 2003
The first generation of cyberlaw was about what regulates cyberspace.Led by Larry Lessig's path-breaking scholarship isolating architecture as a constraint on behavior online, 1 a wide body of work has flourished.In a recent article, I took those insights and reverse-engineered them to show how attention to architecture in realspace (such as our city streets, parks, houses, and other buildings) constrains crime. 2 It is time to begin a new generation of work, one that applies the lessons of realspace study back to the cybernetic realm.The question will not be what regulates cyberspace, but how to do so given the panoply of architectural, legal, economic, and social constraints.This Essay details how theories of realspace architecture inform the regulation of one aspect of cyberspace, computer crime.Computer crime causes enormous damage to the United States economy, with even a single virus causing damage in the billions of dollars and with a recent survey finding that ninety percent of corporations detected computer security breaches. 3 Yet despite apparent metaphorical synergy, architects in realspace generally have not talked to those in cyberspace, and vice versa.There is little analysis of digital architecture and its relationship to crime, and the realspace architectural literature on crime prevention is often far too