Commentator
Associate Professor Ingvild Bruce, The Norwegian Police University College and the University of Oslo.
Leader of the assessment
Professor John Asland, Departement of Private Law.
Supervisors
Professor Inger Marie Sunde, The Norwegian Police University College
Professor Lee A. Bygrave, Department of Private Law.
Abstract
Police’s role on the internet has changed in the last fifteen years. A police force whose primary remit on the internet lay within investigating and prosecuting now emerges proactively anticipating and preventing crimes before they fully materialize. These activities have traditionally been the job of a host of actors—individuals and organizations availing themselves of computers, forum moderators, entities seeing that data is stored and transmitted, or developers of the software, hardware, and protocols underpinning the internet. They are now part of the police’s remit as well.
The police thus come out taking down shared, custom-built internet infrastructure, such as markets for illegal goods and botnets. Some police forces employ targeted advertising campaigns to deliver dissuasive messages to individuals who may be in the early stages of criminal involvement. Yet others appear remotely eradicating malware from infected computers or opening accounts on social media to establish a visible presence and interact with users. Various facets of this trend are observable in Norway as well. By 2019, all 12 police districts in Norway had set up separate “online patrols.” Their efforts are now expected to include dropping in on open chatrooms—in a fashion that mirrors analog street patrols. Also, the National Criminal Investigation Service has been proactively detecting child abuse materials shared on the internet and reaching out to one-click hosting providers and domain name registrars to have them deleted.
These initiatives involve monitoring, behavior control, and the use of force. They can interfere with various fundamental rights, such as respect for private life, freedom of expression, or the prohibition against inhuman or degrading treatment. For example, operations preventing access to specific chatrooms or taking down certain computer servers will likely implicate the right to freedom of expression. Again, that the police visit chatrooms to “observe” users interact may activate the right to respect for private life—particularly if the room is private or semi-private. Thus, there is tension between the police’s initiatives to prevent crime and the encroachment on fundamental rights that some methods may pose.
Yet, how the legal framework negotiates those tensions remains unresolved. Statutes made for offline contexts, such as the Police Act, do not seamlessly apply to police’s work on the internet. For example, under Sections 6 and 7 of the Police Act, the police can use force to “render innocuous or take dangerous things into custody” as a means to avert or stop crimes. Could the meaning of the sentence—meant for firearms, bombs, and knives—be stretched to cover eradicating worms from computers to impede their spread through networks as well? Furthermore, much of police’s work on the internet is largely regulated not by statutory law but by contractual and semi-contractual agreements with entities such as internet service providers, hosting providers, and domain name registries.
Overall, laws crafted to constrain and cater to police work in the analog world often appear ill-suited or ambiguous when such work occurs online. This project, therefore, seeks to identify, describe, and systematize the relevant legal framework.
The dissertation is part of the research project Crime Prevention Online, led by Professor Inger Marie Sunde and funded by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
Program
Carlos Calleja - Presentation (30 min.)
Ingvild Bruce - Comments (30 min.)
Open discussion (30 min.)
Closed meeting (30 min.)
Guidelines for midway assessments
Guidelines for midway assessments, the PhD programme at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo
Participate
This event is open to everyone interested.
To follow the event digitally, please register here by 2:00 PM on Wednesday, April 9, to receive the Zoom link.
Contact
Senior Executive Officer
Kristin Koren Viksjø