WEEK 6 TECHNOLOGY LAW NOTES - CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IN THE DIGITAL SOCIETY
What’s the plan for today?
- What is cybercrime?
+ Who are the perpetrators?
+ Who are the victims?
- How to regulate cybercrime? Is national law sufficiently addressing this phenomenon?
- Or do we need international instruments?
What will we do together?
- Two sets of reflections:
a. The relationship between national approaches and international approaches to
regulate cybercrime.
b. The relationship between ‘old’ (criminal) law and ‘new’ developments.
Relevant remarks:
- It is large scaled.
- It is transnational.
- It affects an expanational amount of people and revenues.
Some history
1960s: Modern computers; ARPANET
- Phreaking (first hacking activities); earlier forms of malware
1970s: @
1980s: PCs become mainstream; WWW
- Financial data theft; copyright infringement; (hacking was curiosity-driven, nothing too
serious).
1990s: PCs go portable; internet commercialization
- Opportunities for cybercrimes expand exponentially (nothing too serious, nothing too
large-scaled).
2000s: Web 2.0; mobile Web, and personal computers became mainstream
- Cybercrimes become a major public concern (when internet started to be used for
commercial use).
2010s: Cloud computing; IoT (Internet of things); AI: They provide exponential territory for
cybercrime to expand. The attacks become more sophisticated and organized. Consequently,
the investigation becomes more difficult.
2020s: IoE…
Block 1 - Criminal behaviour & law
The problem is that we digitalized and use technology in crucial associated services such as
healthcare, transportation, industrial systems, power plants, etc (now hackers can kill people
with a single click):
Cybercrime affects the more vulnerable: Child pornography grows every year, and the
unexpected and unpredictible way they use to commit cybercrime.
, Cybercrime no longer affects one victim or group of people, it could be used by hostal
governments to destabilitized whole countries and to perform cyber espionage or cyber warfare.
Nature of Criminal Law
- Nullum crimen sine lege: No crime without law. Only law can say what is a crime.
- Nulla poena sine lege: No punishment without law.
Two expressions of the same principle: Principle of legality => The scope of the crime and the
applicable punishment can only be defined by law before the commission of the act. Nodoby
can be held responsible for something that they committed when this was not prescribed in a
legal provision as a crime.
International law is not a static process, is a dynamic thing. A lot of provisions are not clearly
interpreted, they are evolving over time and those interpretations changed. Therefore, there is a
problem: how can you have a principle that prohibits retrospective prosecution?
Relation and problems of this principle with cybercrime:
- When cybercrime laws were created, the law was unprepared. Cybercrimes laws
develops rapidly and develops with the technology and sometimes we can extent the
interpretation of the law to accommodate new criminal activities but sometimes this is not
sufficient and legislative changes are needed.
- Nowadays, the principle of legality is codified in all human rights treaties.
Article 7 of the ECHR – No punishment without law
“1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which
did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was
committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time
the criminal offence was committed.
2.This article shall not prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission
which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of
law recognised by civilised nations.”
- The ECtHR adopted a very liberal approach. Yes, there is a prohibition of retroactive
prosecution unless we can show that the activity was prohibited by international law
already. This means that the principle is now open to judicial interpretation of
international law and therefore, we can ban the principles to human rights, human rights
values, and international law values, etc. Therefore, international law would always be
interpreted on the basis of these values and not on the terms of whether this existed on
the text word by word.
Block 2 - Cybercrime
What is cybercrime?
- It is not a single concept, it is rather a combination of acts or a field of criminal activity.
The cybercrime convention does not define cybercrime, it only define certain offences, a
collection of offences.
- Cybercrime can be defined as a crime in which a computer is the object of the crime
(hacking, phishing, spamming) or is used as a tool to commit an offence (fraud, forgery,
sale of illegal substances).
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