Technological innovation alters the commission, definition, and conception of crime. In some cases, computers, social media, and the internet have made existing criminal activity harder to detect or easier to commit. In other cases, they’ve created new forms of criminal activity that challenge longstanding views about the permissibility and punishment of human behavior. Through a range of cybercrime scenarios, this book will address topics such as digital privacy, free speech, terrorism, cybersecurity, image-based sexual abuse, stalking, harassment, doxing, and identity theft.
Our goal in publishing these scenarios is to do our part to make legal education more affordable, accessible, and adaptable. That’s why we’re making the book available to all for free. By using a CC BY-NC license, we’re also inviting others to adapt these materials for their own use, so long as they adhere to the non-commerciality and attribution terms. (Anyone interested in “remixing” this book for their own purposes should feel free to contact us at tek@uga.edu, including if you’d like a more adaptable non-PDF version.)
You’re welcome to print any part of this book if you want a hard copy to accompany the digital version. If you do print it, we ask that you please be environmentally conscious by using double-sided pages. Because the digital version can be easily searched, it contains no index or other finding aids that are conventional for printed books. You should also be able to enhance your experience with the digital version by highlighting text, adding comments, and annotating it in any other ways you find helpful.
You may also purchase a hard copy for around $14 here. This paperback version is made and distributed by Lulu, and I make no revenue from any sales.
Given that this book focuses extensively on different forms of abuse and violence, we caution that some of the scenarios might induce trauma or distress. We worry that providing individualized content warnings before each scenario would reflect our own perspectives and experiences but exclude what might trigger other people, especially because the legal and social issues surrounding cybercrime challenge us to confront difficult and disturbing issues in ways we can’t always predict in advance. Individualized warnings might also bias a reader’s analysis when responding to the questions following each scenario. As a result, we offer this general content warning here and encourage readers to be in the right headspace—whatever that might mean to you—when engaging with these scenarios.
Finally, we welcome any reactions to this book, so please reach out if you think important perspectives are missing or if you find errors or typos. We surely have blind spots in the way we present some topics, plus we lack a professional editor to catch our linguistic blunders. You can contact us at tek@uga.edu with any constructive criticism.
Some of the scenarios in this book can be addressed without conducting outside research, while others build on materials covered in Professor Kadri’s Cybercrime course. If you’d like to see the syllabus designed to accompany these scenarios, please visit www.thomaskadri.com/cybercrime.
Giving Back
If you use this book, we hope you’ll consider donating some of the money you’ll save to one of the following causes (or another cause of your choosing):
Project Safe, which works in and around the Athens community to tackle domestic violence. Project Safe’s executive director is also a Georgia Law alum!
Project South, which seeks to combat racial and economic injustice by cultivating social movements in the South.
Acknowledgments
We created this book with support from a University of Georgia Provost’s Affordable Course Materials Grant. The book incorporates material that also appears in Dilemmas in Digital Abuse (2024).
We’re also immensely grateful to Navroz Tharani—not only did his research assistance influence many of these scenarios, but this entire project was enriched by early brainstorming sessions with him in the spring of 2022. Sarah Burns provided terrific editing assistance. Natalia Pires has a keen and careful eye for nuance. And we’d be remiss not to thank the clever minds at the Midjourney research lab, whose generative AI technology helped us to create the images in this book.
Our thanks, too, to James Grimmelmann, whose own affordable casebook, Internet Law: Cases and Problems, has shaped the way we engage with this subject. We also wish to thank Kendra Albert, Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Evelyn Douek, Orin Kerr, Ido Kilovaty, and Martha Minow, all of whose syllabi helped Professor Kadri in shaping his own Cybercrime course.
Lastly, Professor Kadri wishes to thank and acknowledge Mary Anne Franks, his co-instructor when he first taught Cybercrime in London back in 2018. Her influence on his teaching and scholarship has been considerable. He thanks her for her mentorship and kindness.