Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

9
 
References
context of cyberspace is, it is submitted, rather like separating criminality that takes 
place within an underground transport network from that where the offender uses the 
London Underground to facilitate their offending. In the first situation the setting is a 
key component of the offending while, in the second, it is a chosen part of the wider 
modus operandi and the offender might just as easily have chosen to take the bus, a 
taxi or to walk to and from the locus of their crime. This is the fundamental difference 
between cyber-enabled offending and offending within cyberspace. Policing the exits 
and entrances is never going to be a complete or even satisfactory answer to the latter. 
Aside from the practical and jurisprudential reasons, there are also important political 
imperatives beginning to emerge. For example India’s Telecom and IT Minister Kapil 
Sibal asserted recently that there should be “accountability and responsibility” in the 
cyberspace in the same way as in diplomatic relations:
If there is a cyberspace violation and the subject matter is India because it im-
pacts India, then India should have jurisdiction. For example, if I have an em-
bassy in New York, then anything that happens in that embassy is Indian territory 
and there applies Indian Law.
For this approach to go beyond the conventional jurisdictional approaches considered 
supra would require a whole new set of processes, procedures and skills; it would take 
more than the publication of a set of agreed standards or an agreed recipe for domestic 
legislation. There needs, it is submitted, to be a new presence in cyberspace, a dedicated 
cyber force to tackle what the Director-General of the National Crime Agency, Keith 
Bristow, calls “digital criminality.” Perhaps what is needed is not a new way of overlay-
ing our conventional law enforcement assets and techniques on cyberspace or a new way 
of extending our two-dimensional constructs of jurisdiction to fit a multi-dimensional 
world, but a new wave of cyber assets—“cyber constables” as it were—to patrol and 
police the cyber communities of the future. However, given our global experience of 
the ways in which some state agencies have operated within cyberspace, in the post-
Snowden era that perennial question of democratic law enforcement “quis cusodiet” sits 
just as fixedly above cyber policing as it has in every analog setting to date.
REFERENCES
Armstrong, T., Zuckerberg, M., Page, L., Rottenberg, E., Smith, B., Costelo, D., 2013. An 
Open Letter to Washington. 9 (December 2013).
Beaulac, S., 2004. The Westphalian model in defining international law: challenging the myth. 
Austral. J. Legal History 7, 181–213.
Bender, G., 1998. Bavaria v. Felix Somm: the pornography conviction of the former 
CompuServe manager. Int. J. Commun, Law Policy Web-Doc 14-1-1998.
Canham, D., 2012. Freedom of Information Request to Secretary of State for Justice. (ac-
cessed 24.10.2012). 
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/computer_misuse_act_2
.
Cottim, A., 2010. Cybercrime, cyberterrorism and jurisdiction: an analysis of article 22 of the 
COE convention on cybercrime. Eur. J. Leg. Stud. 2 (3), European University Institute, 
San Dominico de Fiesole, Italy.

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