Internet Jurisdiction, Extraterritoriality and Law Enforcement: Unclaimed Territories in the Cloud - where are the Limits to Internet Jurisdiction?

Speaker - Professor Julia Hörnle (Queen Mary, University of London)

Discussant - Dr Findlay Stark (Faculty of Law, Cambridge)

The Internet is a technology that continues to transform society, thereby inevitably shaping the extent to which the laws of countries can operate outside of their jurisdiction across the world. While there are those who regard the extraterritorial application of some laws positively as a mechanism for protecting the fundamental rights of individuals from threats outside the jurisdiction, it can be also be viewed as an improper intrusion of foreign states on domestic interests. As examined in a previous Technology and Democracy Project seminar, one such example would be the 2015 landmark decision of the highest court in the EU which clearly established that EU data protection law applies to US law governing State surveillance on the basis that the US must provide adequate protection for the processing of personal data that is transferred from the EU to the US.

Hence, the significant but also novel implications posed to the rule of law, due process and privacy by the increasing levels of data processing across national borders by governments and the private sector in the cloud of the Internet makes this area of great interest to the Technology and Democracy Project.

To address the challenges posed by this increasingly important and complex legal area for technology and democracy in the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things, we have brought together Professor of Internet Law Julia Hörnle (QMUL) who will present on this topic and Dr Findlay Stark (Cambridge University Lecturer in Criminal Law and Deputy Director, Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice), the seminar’s discussant and chair.