Quality assurance in crime scripting

BackgroundWith the growing interest in the use of crime scripts and attack scenarios for the development of control measures comes the need for more systematic scripting methods. Information about those sequences of actions that offenders carry out to commit a given type of crime can be extremely valuable to designers as control measures may be designed to influence the possibility to actualise criminal plans. However, there exists limited guidance as to what qualities crime scripts should possess in order to support the creation of suitable requirements, and how they should be handled in a design framework.DiscussionThis theoretical work contributes to the production and sharing of scientifically robust, useful and usable crime scripts. Drawing a link with the main application considered in this paper, it details the ways in which scripts can contribute to the development of functional requirements for control measures. It presents a list of defects commonly encountered with requirements specifications, and identifies those that could originate from poorly constructed scripts. This section adopts a modelling approach to identify and discuss the sought qualities of crime scripts, but the results apply to all scripts developed for the purpose of reducing crime.SummaryThe author presents a list of twelve quality criteria that could be used to evaluate crime scripts. These were identified by considering the common defects of requirements specifications, and tracing back their potential causes within crime scripts. The criteria relate to the following modelling aspects: typology, traceability, transparency, consistency, context, completeness, parsimony, precision, uncertainty, usability, ambiguity and accuracy.A checklist is also provided to facilitate comparison between scripts, contribute to their utility, and ensure that the information required by designers of security systems is available within the functional requirements to be developed for innovative designs. Ultimately, this first investigation of quality assurance in crime scripting opens an important avenue towards further research on the construction and evaluation of crime scripts, their verification and validation.

[1]  Gregory D. Schumacher,et al.  IEEE Guide for Developing System Requirements Specifications , 1999 .

[2]  D. Cornish.  THE PROCEDURAL ANALYSIS OF OFFENDING AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR SITUATIONAL PREVENTION , 1994 .

[3]  S. Chainey,et al.  Profiling Illegal Waste Activity: Using Crime Scripts as a Data Collection and Analytical Strategy , 2011 .

[4]  Ronald V. Clarke,et al.  Become a Problem-Solving Crime Analyst , 2003 .

[5]  Paul Ekblom,et al.  Happy returns: ideas brought back from situational crime prevention’s exploration of design against crime , 2011 .

[6]  G. Marx,et al.  Technological Innovations in Crime Prevention and Policing. A Review of the Research on Implementation and Impact , 2011 .

[7]  Diane M. Strong,et al.  Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means to Data Consumers , 1996, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[8]  Fausto Giunchiglia,et al.  Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[9]  Cynthia A. Phillips,et al.  A graph-based system for network-vulnerability analysis , 1998, NSPW '98.

[10]  Eric Yu,et al.  Modeling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering , 1995, Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering.

[11]  P. Hartel.  Overcoming the insider: reducing employee computer crime through situational crime prevention: Willison R., Siponen M. Communications of the ACM 52(9): 133-137, 2009 , 2009 .

[12]  J. Tschann,et al.  “The Ball was Always in His Court”: An Exploratory Analysis of Relationship Scripts, Sexual Scripts, and Condom Use among African American Women , 2004 .

[13]  Asit P. Basu,et al.  Probabilistic Risk Analysis , 2002 .

[14]  Jonathon Taylor,et al.  Countering Bioterrorism: Why Smart Buildings Should Have a Code of Ethics , 2012, 2012 European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference.

[15]  Francesco Calderoni,et al.  Smith, Martha J. and Derek B. Cornish (Eds): Secure and Tranquil Travel: Preventing Crime and Disorder on Public Transport , 2008 .

[16]  C. Nee,et al.  Expert Decision Making in Burglars , 2006 .

[17]  R. Clarke,et al.  The Reasoning Criminal , 2014 .

[18]  R. Clarke,et al.  Modeling Offenders' Decisions: A Framework for Research and Policy , 1985, Crime and Justice.

[19]  Andreas L. Opdahl,et al.  Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases , 2004, Requirements Engineering.

[20]  Marco Zanella.  Script analysis of corruption in public procurement , 2013 .

[21]  R. Abelson.  Psychological status of the script concept. , 1981 .

[22]  M. Townsley,et al.  Crime Script Analysis of Drug Manufacturing In Clandestine Laboratories Implications for Prevention , 2011 .

[23]  S. Fiske,et al.  What does the Schema Concept Buy us? , 1980 .

[24]  Roger C. Schank,et al.  SCRIPTS, PLANS, GOALS, AND UNDERSTANDING , 1988 .

[25]  Richard B. Felson,et al.  Violence, aggression & coercive actions , 1994 .

[26]  Richard Flynn,et al.  The Conjunction of Terrorist Opportunity: A Framework for Diagnosing and Preventing Acts of Terrorism , 2005 .

[27]  Ka Man Lai,et al.  The role of protection measures and their interaction in determining building vulnerability and resilience to bioterrorism , 2013 .

[28]  T.M. Duffy,et al.  Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development [Book Review] , 1996, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[29]  Paolo Giorgini,et al.  Modelling Risk and Identifying Countermeasure in Organizations , 2006, CRITIS.

[30]  John P. McDermott,et al.  Using abuse case models for security requirements analysis , 1999, Proceedings 15th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'99).

[31]  Robert G. Sargent,et al.  A tutorial on verification and validation of simulation models (1984) , 1984, WSC '07.

[32]  Sonia Toubaline,et al.  An Object-Oriented Approach for Modelling Security Scenarios , 2013, 2013 UKSim 15th International Conference on Computer Modelling and Simulation.

[33]  George S. Fishman,et al.  The statistics of discrete-event simulation , 1968 .

[34]  C. S. Holling.  Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management , 2005 .

[35]  Jacob I. Stowell.  Institutional Corrections and Hard Technology , 2006 .

[36]  Richard Keith Wortley,et al.  Getting into the Script of Adult Child Sex Offenders and Mapping out Situational Prevention Measures , 2011 .

[37]  Robert J. Ellison,et al.  Attack Trees , 2009, Encyclopedia of Biometrics.

[38]  K. L. Yanowitz,et al.  The Role of Gender in the Generation of Stalking Scripts , 2012 .

[39]  J. Gagnon,et al.  Sexual scripts: Permanence and change , 1986, Archives of sexual behavior.

[40]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Social cognition, 2nd ed. , 1991 .

[41]  Paul Ekblom,et al.  Specifying the explosion-resistant railway carriage—a ‘bench’ test of the Security Function Framework , 2012 .

[42]  Graham Hancock,et al.  Organised crime and crime scripts: prospects for disruption , 2013 .

[43]  E. Savona,et al.  Savona, Ernesto, Luca Giommoni, and Marina Mancuso. 2014. “Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation in Italy.” In Cognition and Crime. Offender Decision Making and Script Analyses, edited by Benoit Leclerc and Richard Wortley. New York: Routledge. , 2014 .

[44]  Paul Ekblom,et al.  Design against crime: crime proofing everyday objects , 2011 .

[45]  T. Le Sage,et al.  Dynamic generation of event trees for risk modelling of terrorist attacks , 2012, 2012 IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST).

[46]  D. Rossmo,et al.  A Descriptive Model of the Hunting Process of Serial Sex Offenders: A Rational Choice Perspective , 2007, Journal of Family Violence.

[47]  Edward J. Rykiel,et al.  Testing ecological models: the meaning of validation , 1996 .

[48]  Mikko T. Siponen,et al.  Overcoming the insider: reducing employee computer crime through Situational Crime Prevention , 2009, CACM.

[49]  Robert Willison,et al.  Understanding the perpetration of employee computer crime in the organisational context , 2006, Inf. Organ..

[50]  Fadhel Kaboub.  Realistic Evaluation , 2004 .

[51]  Richards J. Heuer,et al.  Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis , 2014 .

[52]  Axel van Lamsweerde,et al.  Requirements Engineering: From System Goals to UML Models to Software Specifications , 2009 .

[53]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Goal-driven risk assessment in requirements engineering , 2011, Requirements Engineering.

[54]  Sd Johnson,et al.  Potential uses of computer agent-based simulation modeling in the evaluation of wildlife poaching , 2014 .

[55]  Ronald V. Clarke,et al.  Become a Problem-solving Crime Analyst in 55 Small Steps , 2003 .

[56]  Bohsiu Wu,et al.  Kidnapping in Taiwan , 2007, International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology.

[57]  Donald Firesmith,et al.  Security Use Cases , 2003, J. Object Technol..

[58]  R. Abelson.  Script processing in attitude formation and decision making. , 1976 .

[59]  Eric Beauregard,et al.  Script Analysis of the Hunting Process of Serial Sex Offenders , 2007 .

[60]  David D. Walden,et al.  Systems engineering handbook : a guide for system life cycle processes and activities , 2015 .

[61]  Barbara Kordy,et al.  Attack-defense trees , 2014, J. Log. Comput..

[62]  Carlo Morselli,et al.  BROKERAGE QUALIFICATIONS IN RINGING OPERATIONS , 2008 .

[63]  Stephen Fickas,et al.  Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition , 1993, Sci. Comput. Program..

[64]  P. Ekblom.  PROXIMAL CIRCUMSTANCES: A MECHANISM-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF CRIME PREVENTION , 1994 .

[65]  G. Laycock,et al.  The Value of Crime Scripting: Deconstructing Internal Child Sex Trafficking , 2011 .

[66]  Pamela Zave,et al.  Deriving Specifications from Requirements: an Example , 1995, 1995 17th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[67]  S. Kaplan,et al.  On The Quantitative Definition of Risk , 1981 .

[68]  John A. Sokolowski,et al.  Probabilistic Risk Analysis and Terrorism Risk , 2010, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[69]  P. Tremblay,et al.  Body Switching and Related Adaptations in the Resale of Stolen Vehicles. Script Elaborations and Aggregate Crime Learning Curves , 2001 .

[70]  Martin Gill,et al.  The Handbook of Security , 2014 .

[71]  Nadine Deslauriers-Varin,et al.  Victims’ Routine Activities and Sex Offenders’ Target Selection Scripts: A Latent Class Analysis , 2010, Sexual abuse : a journal of research and treatment.

[72]  E. Savona,et al.  Human trafficking for sexual exploitation in Italy , 2015 .