Shaping the Jurisdictional Space of Transnational Organized Cybercrime: Understanding Structures, Legal Geographies and Strategies

The relationship between transnational organized crime, legal spatiality and jurisdiction becomes even more complex when criminal activities are carried out in cyberspace, a borderless realm that appears to question any geographical and country-based strategy of repression and prevention of crime. In the first part, the paper thus aims to understand how cyber-space affected the phenomenology of transnational organized crime, simultaneously dissolving and empowering its internal structures. As a key to understanding the phenomenon, we propose the distinction between organized cyber-crime (namely, traditional cybercrime gaining an unprecedented organized dimension) and cyber-organized crime (namely, traditional organized crime gaining an unprecedented cyber-dimension). Indeed, TOCs against ICTs and cyber-infrastructures (e.g., massive or strategic hacking) and TOCs using ICTs to commit crimes and organize criminal activities (e.g., terrorism) can affect in very different ways both perceptions of insecurity in the global cyberspace and the effectiveness and legitimacy of repressive strategies. In the second part, the paper aims therefore to understand how these substantial changes impact the legal strategies developed by States and international organizations to prevent, counter, and exert (sovereign) power on this new dimension of criminal activities. To this end, starting from a taxonomy of all different criteria used to localize transnational organized cybercrime (harm, groups, profits, …), the paper aims to identify both ascending (from local to global) and descending (from global to local) strategies to combat such a criminal phenomenon, understanding how jurisdictional and legal geographies shape the space of transnational organized cybercrime.