Cyberpsychologist: Online, 'Every Contact Leaves A Trace'

Transcript

ARUN RATH, HOST:

The CSI franchise has a new lead investigator.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CSI: CYBER")

PATRICIA ARQUETTE: (As Special Agent Avery Ryan) I'm special agent Avery Ryan. I'm here to get your son back.

RATH: "CSI: Cyber" premiered this week. That's recent Oscar winner Patricia Arquette. The unit Agent Ryan leads is called in on cyber stalking, identity theft, even cases involving hacked baby cams.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CSI: CYBER")

ARQUETTE: (As Special Agent Avery Ryan) Detective Cho, please treat all hardware, including the baby cam, like a dead body. Don't touch it. Don't move it until we get there.

RATH: That character is based on real-life cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken.

MARY AIKEN: My job as a cyberpsychologist is to deliver insight at that intersection between humans and technology, or sometimes, as law enforcement says, where humans and technology collide.

RATH: So given us an example of a type of crime that you would get pulled into and how you would work on it.

AIKEN: So in terms of cyberbehavioral analysis, I'm looking at the overall picture. Say for online sex offending, how do they operate in that space? For cyberstalking, the difference between real-world stalking and cyberstalking.

It would be very hard to commit a crime in this day and age that didn't have some cyber element. And effectively, in terms of crime analysis, we're looking at the digital fingerprint. If you come back to the basic premise of forensic science, I've been sitting here, I've touched the table I've left a fingerprint. There's the evidence. Nowhere is this more true than online. Every contact leaves a trace.

RATH: So with the new TV show, the pilot of the show opens with a kidnapping that involves a baby monitor. Can you explain the scenario?

AIKEN: The premise of the episode is about a baby cam that is hacked and an online auction of infants where babies are kidnapped to order.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CSI: CYBER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: They were casing the baby remotely and learned its habits - when he sleeps, what time the parents come in to feed - and at the most vulnerable hour - snatch.

AIKEN: Kidnap gangs have them and they're transporting them to the buyers, and we intercept at that stage. But it all ends well.

RATH: Right.

AIKEN: The babies are rescued. It's actually based on a real crime where a father was walking by his daughter's bedroom, and he heard horrible conversation coming from the room. And he rushed in and a predator had hacked into the infant's baby cam and was verbally abusing her as she lay asleep.

We wrote the episode. We filmed it. It was finished. And then about eight weeks later, there was a huge hacking episode where a couple of hundred thousand web cams were hacked and live footage were hosted up on Russian websites. They had footage of people's driveways, footage of people's kitchens. And they also showed footage of babies asleep in their cribs.

RATH: I was going to ask you how realistic is that kidnapping scenario?

AIKEN: It's the next extension. Look, this is entertainment, but our intention is not to induce paranoia in terms of the use of baby cams. The intention is to say look, consider the logic and think about security and think about safety.

RATH: Do you worry though about the fear factor that - you know, there's another episode that involves a ridesharing service. And do you worry that, you know, you're going to scare people away from Uber or Lyft or things like that or make them more scared than they need to be?

AIKEN: I think that our show takes quite a moderate approach in terms of it's not very gory, it's not very horrific. But people like to be scared. If you went on a roller coaster and it went from A to - what do you say - Z, not zed. It went from A to Z. And it was flat. Well, you wouldn't enjoy the ride. So good programming is about a roller coaster ride. It's up and it's down and we want a happy ending. But we've worked very, very hard to ground our show in reality - the reality of cyber.

RATH: You're an academic.

AIKEN: Yes.

RATH: What has it been like going through this whole, wild, like Hollywood, TV experience?

AIKEN: It's been quite surreal. I mean, nobody was more surprised than me to actually get a phone call. I'm a professor of cyberanalytics. I have a background in cyberpsychology, in network science, and a fellowship in criminology. So I'm out and out academic.

When they approached me, I thought it was interesting. I listened to what they had to say. And then I took a step back and had to really think about it because my focus is my discipline. For cyberpsychology, it can help deliver insight, it can help people understand the dynamics of this environment.

RATH: Cyber psychologist Mary Aiken is a producer of the new show "CSI: Cyber." Mary, real pleasure speaking with you. Thank you.

AIKEN: Thank you, Arun.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN SEE FOR MILES")

THE WHO: (Singing) I can see for miles and miles. I can see for miles and miles. I can see for miles and miles. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.