"Bringing together perspectives from academia and practice, this second edition Research Handbook provides fresh insights into debates surrounding digital technology and how to respect and protect human rights in an increasingly digital world. New and updated chapters cover the issues posed by the m
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anagement of key internet resources, the governance of its architecture and the role of different stakeholders." (Publisher description)
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"We discuss a successful intervention in the management of Internet infrastructure – a campaign which has achieved genuine traction against a cybercrime issue that has dogged the network engineering community for more than thirty years. Internet infrastructure is often characterised as beset by pe
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rverse incentives which frustrate the achievement of common goods –establishing fixes to deep design issues with Internet architecture involves communal action at scale which is hard to manage in a decentralised, competitive, and marketized ecosystem of providers. While much scholarship has sought to establish the incentives frustrating action against cybercrime and identify possible ways to alter these, in this case we observe a community acting to short-circuit them entirely. We develop the concept of infrastructural capital to explain how key actors were able to relocate the issue of spoofing away from the commercial incentive structures of a decentralised ecosystem of competingproviders with little motivation to solve the issue and into the incentive structures of a far more densely networked and centralised professional community of network engineers. This extends previous work applying theory from infrastructure studies to cybercrime economies, developing a new account of how power can be asserted within infrastructure to achieve change, apparently against the grain of other long-standing incentives." (Abstract)
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"Cybercrime has been on the rise since the 1990s, and so is the need for researchers and public administrations to better estimate its prevalence, incidence, distribution and nature. The limitations of police statistics as measures of crime are widely known and seem even more severe—in terms of th
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e volume of unrecorded offenses—in the case of cybercrimes. The problem of under-recording may be even more acute for crimes suffered by organizations. From that perspective, victimization surveys with national representative samples are seen as the main alternative to obtain more valid and reliable estimates of cybercrime and cyberdeviance. Self-reported delinquency studies can provide information on juvenile cybercrime and cyberdeviance from the point of view of the offenders and, if accompanied by a victimization module, on the incidents suffered by the younger generations. Surveys also provide information on many other variables that are absent from police or court recorded crimes, related to the personal characteristics of individuals, their everyday activities, cybersecurity practices and so on, which allow identifying key risk factors and testing different theories of online crime and deviance. In addition, surveys conducted regularly can also be key to assessing temporal changes in overall criminal behavior. While we have seen a rapid increase in the number of crime surveys that include measures of cybercrime since the early 2010s, our scoping review has identified a series of practices that could be refined to better measure online victimization and offending, and to enable cross-national and temporal comparisons. Overall, it seems reasonable to state that cybercrime and cyberdeviance is measured less adequately than more traditional crime types. This might be in part due to the ever-changing nature of cyberspace." (Ways forward and conclusions, pages 65-66)
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"Die Reichweite der Cybercrime-Branche hat einen neuen Höhepunkt erreicht. 72% aller Organisationen weltweit berichten vom steigenden Cyberrisiko. Der Schaden durch Cybercrime betrug 2024 allein in Deutschland 178,6 Mrd. Euro. Das sind 20% mehr als im Vorjahr. Cyberkriminelle hängen Organisatione
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n bei der Nutzung von KI ab: 91 % der Sicherheitsbeauftragten weltweit erwarten in den nächsten drei Jahren einen deutlichen Anstieg KI-getriebener Angriffe. Und obwohl sich 96% der Sicherheitsexperten einig sind, dass es wichtig ist, KI-basierte Angriffe zu erkennen, schätzen nur 26 % ihre eigene Fähigkeit diesbezüglich als hoch ein. Angreifende nutzen jeden verfügbaren Kanal als mögliches Eintrittstor: 56% der Sicherheitsbeauftragten in der DACH-Region zufolge ist E-Mail immer noch der primäre Angriffskanal. 98% der Organisationen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz berichten von einem Anstieg bei Multi-Channel-Angriffen via E-Mail, Messaging-Apps, Social Media und Deepfake-Sprachanrufen.." (Executive Summary)
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"This chapter examines the digital surveillance and harassment experiences faced by female journalists in Zimbabwe in the 2023 pre-election period covering the year 2022 up to August 2023. The examination is based on interviews conducted with seven purposefully selected female reporters and editors
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in Zimbabwe. It suggests that within our information-driven society, both personal data and physical bodies are subject to surveillance; for female journalists in particular, this surveillance materialises as instances of harassment occurring both online and offline, including within newsroom settings. Evidence shows that there is both the physical and psychological intimidation of female journalists and periods of political unrests are particularly unsettling. Female journalists are subject to unique forms of hostility absent in their male counterparts’ experiences. To cope the journalists, adopt various survival strategies, from cyber defence techniques and keeping a low online profile to outright evasion or extreme cases of leaving the country. The female journalists advocate for thorough protection measures, including legal reforms, strict penalties, and holding online platforms accountable. They emphasise the importance of mental health support, training, and guidance from media organizations, in addition to institutional and legislative action. The chapter employs a feminist perspective to highlight the importance of power dynamics in surveillance. Feminist politics within media call for women not only to be visible but also heard, which can only occur if they have representation in decision-making processes that shape news coverage and can write stories without fearing harassment. Drawing inspiration from the Panopticon theory of surveillance, this chapter explores the idea that individuals may be monitored without their awareness. With this framework in mind, three key questions are addressed: Did journalists experience any form of digital or physical surveillance? Were they subjected to any type of harassment stemming from such monitoring? And did they receive support from media organizations during these incidents?" (Abstract)
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"The surveillance of journalists, including using spyware technology, poses a fundamental threat to media freedom, the digital safety of journalists, and source protection within the European Union. The agreement on the European Media Freedom Act in December 2023 offers some further protections agai
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nst the fast evolving threat to journalists and their sources. Those involved in pushing the deal over the line and ensuring the removal of explicit references to national security in exemptions deserve credit. Yet the full impact of the Article 4 provisions – as all other new rules in the EMFA – remains to be seen and effective implementation will be vital. Greece and Hungary offer the strongest examples of why strong enforcement will be needed. However, both countries have already demonstrated how overly broad and vague exemptions for national security have already been used to justify the otherwise unjustifiable surveillance of journalists." (Conclusion)
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"Revelations from the 2021 “Pegasus Project” investigation into the use of spyware have confirmed long-held concerns about the proliferation of the technology as a surveillance solution to monitor the activities of journalists around the world. Spyware is a particularly malicious form of malware
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that can potentially expose a target’s entire digital life, sometimes even leaving victims powerless to prevent an attack. As such, spyware appears to be the ultimate tool of oppression that can be used against journalists, and its proliferation is currently taking place with extremely limited transparency and according to "black box" dynamics. The aim of this paper is to shed light on how spyware technology can affect the work and security of journalists by analyzing what threats spyware poses to the practice of journalism. Qualitative and exploratory in nature, and theoretically grounded in surveillance studies and the growing body of literature on information security in journalism, the article is based on a series of qualitative interviews with technologists and reporters conducted to deepen the understanding of the threats posed by spyware and to provide an overview of potential resistance and neutralization practices that journalists can put in place, as well as their effectiveness. Overall, the article aims to contribute to the study of the impact of surveillance on journalism and its implications for press freedom." (Abstract)
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"This article examines the public response to mandatory location disclosure (MLD), a new surveillance technology implemented on China’s Sina Weibo. Initially introduced to geo-tag posts related to the Ukraine War, the MLD eventually expanded to encompass all posts and comments on the platform. Dra
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wing on a large-scale dataset comprising over 0.6 million posts and 24 million comments, this study uncovers political asymmetry observed during the initial implementation of MLD. Users with different political orientations were subjected to different levels of geo-tagging. Pro-Ukraine users were most frequently geo-tagged, followed by Pro-Russia and liberal-leaning users, while conservative-leaning users are least likely to be tagged. This selective surveillance approach, however, backfired among Pro-Ukraine and Pro-Russia users, pushing them to publish more war-related content, while its impact on liberal- and conservative-leaning users appeared to be minimal. When selective surveillance was replaced by universal surveillance, the backfire effects ceased to exist and people’s interest in war-related topics declined. Furthermore, privacy cynicism prevails among commenters across opinion groups. Neither the introduction nor the expansion of MLD deterred audiences from engaging with the geo-tagged posts. These findings suggest that prolonged surveillance makes people less sensitive to privacy threats and more experienced in neutralizing surveillance’s influence on themselves. Privacy cynicism, though widely considered toxic to democracy, can function as a source of resilience that shields people from the fear of coercion and undercuts the marginal utility of state surveillance in an authoritarian context." (Abstract)
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"This article discusses the perspectives of European Union (EU) / European Economic Area Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) on their role in protecting democratic rights and freedoms in digitalised societies. Data Protection Authorities, which are independent regulators, are responsible for implemen
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ting the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation in their respective countries. The views of DPAs are important given their special role in monitoring newly emerging digital technologies and how their use may impact on the functioning of democracies. The article highlights three key themes which emerged in interviews with 18 DPAs in answer to the question about what they consider to be the greatest challenges to democratic freedoms. These are: (1) threats to elections due to the manipulation of voters; (2) discriminatory effects of automated decision-making; and (3) broader chilling effects on democratic norms due to ubiquitous surveillance. The article then analyses the solutions named by DPAs to mitigate these challenges to identify their governing, or political, rationalities. The paper finds that the solutions available to DPAs to manage democratic harms tend to emphasise individual over collective responsibility and are connected to broader currents of neoliberal governance. The paper highlights the ways in which some DPAs act as important critical voices within their respective jurisdictions to draw political attention to potentially anti-democratic effects of certain practices, such as profiling, or to the model of digitalisation as it is currently constructed." (Abstract)
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