Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

5
 
The size of the challenge
United Kingdom had been caused by a Lithuanian national who had been uninsured 
at the time. The Motor Insurers’ Bureau is the UK compensation body for the pur-
poses of the relevant EU Directive and was obliged to pay compensation where a UK 
resident had been injured in a collision in another Member State caused by an unin-
sured driver. In such cases, the Directive enabled the Bureau to claim reimbursement 
from the respective compensatory body in the other Member State. However, under 
the domestic law of Lithuania the liability of the compensatory body was capped at 
€
500 k. The Bureau argued that its liability to pay the victim should be capped by 
Lithuanian domestic law even though the collision happened on an English road.
Clearly the challenges of unauthorized access and use of data obtain; so too do 
the jurisdictional challenges of locus of initiators and consequences. However, these 
have to be understood in the context of the much more pernicious and truly viral 
threats such as denial of service attacks, malware, data espionage and what Cottim 
calls the scareword of “cyber-terrorism” which has now become formally adopted 
by many law enforcement agencies, politicians and commentators. The reality is 
that, with the requisite knowledge and motivation, a teen with a laptop can alter the 
“use by” dates on food products in a packing plant on the other side of the world, 
or command the central heating system of a neighbor’s Internet-connected home to 
overheat, or send the traffic lights in a far away city into a frenzy. The further reality 
is that the wattle-and-daub constructs of conventional law making in common law 
countries, along with their correlative law enforcement practices, will not provide the 
answer to these threats and risks and even staples such as “crime scenes” and “perpe-
trators” are no longer adequate within the new frontier of cyberspace.
However, it is not just the domination and manipulation of cyberspace by crimi-
nals that has caused public concern. The aftermath of the Edward Snowden rev-
elations about intrusive governmental espionage demonstrated that cyberspace is 
regarded as a potentially perilous place by private users not just in fear of becoming 
victims of remote criminality. There is also a real fear that the technological environ-
ment allows state agencies to operate in highly intrusive yet anonymous and unac-
countable ways, prompting the CEOs of some of the world’s leading IT companies 
to write an open letter to the President of the United States demanding reform of 
cyberspace surveillance based on a series of overarching principles that guarantee the 
free flow of information yet limit governmental authority and impose a substantial 
degree of oversight (
Armstrong et al., 2013
).
What then is the size of the challenge presented by this amorphous construct of 
cyberspace?