Technology as a Double-Edged Sword: Corruption and Anti-Corruption Developments in Brazil

Corruption can occur as an individual or an organizational crime. The study of organizational crime requires organizational concepts (McIntosh, 1975). One of the hypotheses brought forth in the interdisciplinary area of criminology and sociology of organizations is that crime becomes more organized depending upon the given opportunities for crime, and the techniques for crime prevention (Albanese, 1984). Professional crime could therefore be geared to handle the technical problems of execution, which include new barriers created through technological developments, such as anti-money laundering initiatives, surveillance technology, decentralized auditing, transparency portals, digital registry requirements etc. As law enforcement and crime prevention becomes more effective, do criminals escalate their efforts to be successful? If so, those seeking to corrupt would be engaged in a battle with state control agents which escalates as each side improves its techniques to outwit the other. Once the technology that helps curb corruption reaches a certain level, we could expect the criminal practices to reach a close level of technological efficiency in order to maintain acceptable, albeit not the same levels of success. Brazil, as a major player in the world scenery and somewhat representative of the complex Latin American context, constantly dealing with corruption scandals, will be our subject of observation. For example, Car Wash Operation, inspired by Italy's Mani Pulite Operation, managed to get traction and popular support by means of social media and also tried engaging civil society to independently audit public servants through the new transparency platforms. The same tactic, however, was used by the defendants to delegitimize the prosecution and the judges. With a mixed-methods approach, we analyse Brazil’s institutional, legislative, and technological developments through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of judicial records and a qualitative analysis of expert interviews in order to access the state-of-the-art in anti-corruption control and policy, the current corrupt modus operandi and the efficacy of the aforementioned developments. Brazil – Corruption – Organizational Theory – Technology - Prevention