EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
to elements or effects of the act, or the location of computer systems or data utilized for the
offence. Where they arise, jurisdictional conflicts are typically resolved through formal and
informal consultations between countries. Country responses do not reveal, at present, any
need for additional forms of jurisdiction over a putative ‘cyberspace’ dimension. Rather, forms
of territoriality-based and nationality-based jurisdiction are almost always able to ensure a
sufficient connection between cybercrime acts and at least one State.
Forms of international cooperation include extradition, mutual legal assistance, mutual
recognition
of
foreign
Means of obtaining extra‐territorial evidence
judgments, and informal policeto-police cooperation. Due to
4%
6%
Formal MLA request
the volatile nature of electronic
Informal police cooperation
8%
evidence,
international
Direct contact with service
cooperation in criminal matters
provider
in the area of cybercrime
24/7 network point of
9%
contact
requires timely responses and
Other
the ability to request specialized
investigative actions, such as
preservation of computer data.
73%
Use of traditional forms of
cooperation predominates for
Source: Study cybercrime questionnaire. Q105. (n=56, r=221)
obtaining
extra-territorial
evidence in cybercrime cases, with over 70 per cent of countries reporting using formal mutual
legal assistance requests for this purpose. Within such formal cooperation, almost 60 per cent
of requests use bilateral instruments as the legal basis. Multilateral instruments are used in 20
per cent of cases. Response times for formal mechanisms were reported to be of the order of
months, for both extradition and mutual legal assistance requests, a timescale which presents
challenges to the collection of volatile electronic evidence. Sixty per cent of countries in Africa,
the Americas and Europe, and 20 per cent in Asia and Oceania, report channels for urgent
requests. However, the impact of these on response times is unclear. Modes of informal
cooperation are possible for around two-thirds of reporting countries, although few countries
have a policy for the use of such mechanisms. Initiatives for informal cooperation and for
facilitating formal cooperation, such as 24/7 networks, offer important potential for faster
response times. They are, however, under-utilized, handling around three per cent of the total
number of cybercrime cases encountered by law enforcement for the group of reporting
countries.
Formal and informal modes of cooperation are designed to manage the process of
State consent for the conduct of foreign law enforcement investigations that affect a State’s
sovereignty. Increasingly, however, investigators, knowingly or unknowingly, access extraterritorial data during evidence gathering, without the consent of the State where the data is
physically situated. This situation arises, in particular, due to cloud computing technologies
which involve data storage at multiple data centres in different geographic locations. Data
‘location’, whilst technically knowable, is becoming increasingly artificial, to the extent that
even traditional mutual legal assistance requests will often be addressed to the country that is
the seat of the service provider, rather than the country where the data centre is physically
located. Direct foreign law enforcement access to extraterritorial data could occur when
investigators make use of an existing live connection from a suspect’s device, or where
investigators use lawfully obtained data access credentials. Law enforcement investigators may,
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