Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 1
Cyberspace: The new frontier for policing?
Given the legal and practical difficulties that are explored infra, the extent to 
which local policing bodies are in a position to meet these criteria in a meaningful 
way in relation to “cyber incidents”—whether “upon” or within cyberspace is ques-
tionable. For example, while it is a relatively simple task to assess the capacity and 
capability of a group of local police force (even a large one such as the Metropolitan 
Police) to tackle large-scale public disorder, and to measure the connectivity of their 
resources in preparing for such an event, it is far harder to demonstrate that the same 
forces meet the five C requirements (capability, connectivity, and so on) required to 
understand and respond to even a highly localized cyber incident, still less a cyber 
attack sponsored by another state. This too is important because the courts in the 
United Kingdom have interpreted the expression “have regard to” a government pol-
icy as meaning that public bodies fixed with such a duty must above all properly un-
derstand that policy. If a government policy to which a public body must have regard 
is not properly understood by that body this has the same legal effect as if that body 
had paid no regard to it at all. Further, if a public body is going to depart from a gov-
ernment policy to which it must “have regard,” that body has to give clear reasons for 
doing so, such that people know why and on what grounds it is being departed from. 
While the EU might have a series of arrangements in place which require Member 
States to notify them of “incidents” that “seem to relate to cyber espionage or a state-
sponsored attack” and invoke the relevant parts of the EU Solidarity Clause, there is 
little evidence that most police areas would be in a position confidently to make that 
assertion, promptly or at all.
Quaere: how well are all affected police agencies in England and Wales able to 
demonstrate that they have properly understood the threat of a cyber attack in the 
context of the SPR? If the answer to this is anything other than an unqualified “yes,” 
then they might do well to issue a notification to that effect to their respective com-
munities and stakeholders.
CONCLUSION
Tackling computer-enabled criminality has generally focused on the physical pres-
ence of those controlling, benefiting, or suffering from the remote activity—it has been 
concerned with input and output. The European Union has a proposed Directive to re-
quire Member States to ensure they have minimum levels of capability in place, along 
with Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and arrangements for effective 
coordination of “network and information systems.” At the same time the Budapest 
Convention has been in force for almost a decade to provide a model for the many signa-
tory nations (including the United States) to draft their domestic “cybercrime” legisla-
tion and the correlative cyber security industry is vast and burgeoning. But is there not a 
pressing need to tackle what is taking place in cyberspace itself? Using existing jurisdic-
tional theories is arguably not enough; what is needed is not a partial application of some 
extra-cyberspace laws adapted to suit some extra-cyberspace consequences. Continuing 
to apply the traditional criminological approaches to technological innovation in the 

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