Cybercrimes With Ben Hammersley

In October 2013, the site was closed down by the FBI and its alleged founder arrested in San Francisco. Ben Hammersley explores whether the young man who now awaits trial -Ross Ulbricht- really is Dread Pirate Roberts, and finds out what impact alter egos, darknets, and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have on the modern world.

2013 was a very bad year for big business. In February $45m was stolen from ATMs around the world after cybercriminals hacked credit cards and gave them unlimited withdrawal limits. Ben Hammersley travels to New York and Washington DC to look at how crime has evolved, forensically examining the many ranks and roles of a modern criminal organization.

It's been estimated that almost 70% of all email traffic is spam. And, online, it is Nigeria that is often seen as the biggest culprit. Ben Hammersley travels to Lagos to meet online scammers and the police tasked with tracking them down. But in a country of 168 million and the largest economy in Africa, Ben asks if labeling Nigeria as the worst offender is just another lazy stereotype.

The Pirate Bay is one of the largest file sharing sites in the world, founded in Sweden in 2003 by Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, and Peter Sunde. The founders were tried for copyright infringement in 2009. Ben visits Stockholm to tell the story of the internet trial of the century and looks at how it affected our relationship with Big Media, copyright, and the notion of ownership online.

It has been described as the Hiroshima of cyberwar, the moment where the fevered imaginations of science fiction finally came true. A computer worm called Stuxnet disrupted what the west claimed to be Iran's top-secret plans to build a nuclear bomb. Ben Hammersley travels to LA, Berlin, and London to find out what impact Stuxnet has had on the future of warfare.

In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed to the world the systematic surveillance of global internet traffic by the US and the UK. Ben Hammersley travels to Washington DC, New York, London, and Berlin to examine the ramifications of Snowden's NSA files. Do our governments need these powers to protect us from terrorism, pedophilia and cyber criminality? Or should we fight for the right to privacy online?