Snapshots of Society: Studying Cybercrime Every Here

Notes: Irnasya Hadi explains how growing up with the internet, and being frustrated by the limited connection between critical criminology and cybercrime, drew her toward the study of cyber insecurity. The conversation turns to Indonesia and the difficulty of producing nationally representative cybercrime research in a country with a very large population, uneven internet access and uneven documentation. She discusses why cybercrime theories, surveys and assumptions from places such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia cannot simply be imported into Indonesian or Asian contexts. The episode examines the stereotype that cybercrime is produced in Asia and victimizes people elsewhere. Hadi pushes back against this framing by noting that many of the victims of cybercrime in Asia are themselves Asian. She reflects on the imbalance between Global North and Global South knowledge production, especially when Global South researchers often have to know Northern theory while Northern researchers may know far less about Southern contexts. The conversation introduces the Snapshot of Society method, which begins with people and organizations already working on a topic, then moves to affected members of the public, then to a broader survey stage. Civil society organizations can provide an insider perspective on issues such as government data breaches, while affected members of the public can reveal where expert assumptions do or do not match lived experience. A central finding from Hadi’s work is that people may not be indifferent to government data breaches. Instead, they may care deeply but feel too fatigued, resigned or worn down to respond. The discussion explores generational differences in how Indonesians understand government data breaches. Younger people may be more aware of cascading risks such as spam calls, identity theft and data being sold online, while older generations may interpret exposure to online risk differently. She discusses the role of insider knowledge in qualitative research, including how local jokes, shared experience and awareness of government priorities can shape what a researcher hears and how they interpret it. The episode closes with the broader promise of the Snapshot of Society approach: locally grounded studies from different places could be added together to build a richer global picture of cybercrime that does not simply mean the United States and the United Kingdom. About our guest: Irnasya Hadi https://www.linkedin.com/in/irnasya-shafira-hadi-9524b0145/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dnc6cUcAAAAJ https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8929-329X   Papers or resources mentioned in this episode: Hadi, I. S., Chang, L. Y. C., & Davies, S. G. (2026). The Snapshot of Society: Challenges of Studying Cyber Insecurity in the Global South? Asian Journal of Criminology, 21, Article 25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-026-09494-4 Hadi, I. S. (2025). Inaction as Nonformal Reaction: Rethinking Crime Perception in the Era of Data Breaches. Jurnal Kriminologi Indonesia, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.7454/kriminologi.v1.i1.1000   Other: “The data analysis process uses Atlas.ti software, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, printouts, and highlighters.” (Hadi et al., 2026, p. 14).  🤣