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LAW3306 - Cybercrime: Law, Policy, and Society

  • Offered for Year: 2027/28
  • Module Leader(s): Professor Ben Farrand
  • Owning School: Newcastle Law School
  • Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Semester 2 Credit Value: 20
ECTS Credits: 10.0

Aims

The purpose of this module is to provide an interdisciplinary account of cybercrime and illegal activities carried out online, drawing from the expertise in Law and that of the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology in empirical and theoretical conceptualisations of crime. It intends to familiarise students with the relevant international, European, and national frameworks for a range of distinct cyber-offences, which are in turn linked to specific instances of criminological inquiry.

Outline Of Syllabus

All case-study sessions are examples, as specific case studies will vary by year based on student interest and staff availability

  • Introduction to cybercrime – understanding the technology
  • The European and International Cybercrime Conventions
  • Computer-targeted crimes: attacks against information systems, illegal system interference and data manipulation
  • Identify theft and fraud
  • Online sexual offences: from cyberstalking to CSAM
  • Case study: deepfakes, AI, and AI-facilitated crimes
  • Case study: drug use, harm reduction, and drug trafficking online
  • Case study: hate speech, misogyny, and social media regulation
  • Case study: Cyberwar, cyberdefence, and hacktivism
  • Drawing themes together and assessment advice

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities
Category Activity Number Length Student Hours Comment
Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities Lecture 11 2:00 22:00 N/A
Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities Small group teaching 4 1:00 4:00 N/A
Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities Dropin/surgery 4 1:00 4:00 N/A
Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities Workshops 1 3:00 3:00 Assessment preparation workshop
Structured Guided Learning Structured research and reading activities 11 2:00 22:00 Reading in advance of lectures
Guided Independent Study Directed research and reading 1 81:00 81:00 N/A
Guided Independent Study Assessment preparation and completion 1 64:00 64:00 N/A
Total 200:00  
Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures are used to provide students with key information and understanding of the substance of cybercrime. Seminars are discrete sessions covering the substantive content covered in lectures applied to a range of questions, either more theoretical or problem-based, depending on the session. Seminars are student led. The structured reading sessions are intended as foundational reading familiarising students with relevant legal and criminological content in advance of lectures, so that lectures can be dedicated to deeper analysis of the legal and criminological frameworks covered in each session, suitable for FHEQ Level 6 work. The guided independent learning is intended to prepare students for seminar preparation, with the three hour workshop being used as the basis for the final assessment for the module.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment
Description Semester When Set Percentage Comment
Essay 1 1 M 37 Research essay- 1,500 words
Written exercise 1 1 M 63 AI analysis task- 2,500 words
Assessment Rationale And Relationship

There are two assignments for this module. The first is a 1,500 word research essay undertaken during the semester, worth 37% of the grade, and a 2,500 word AI-based task undertaken during the assessment period. The research essay requires students to answer one of four questions centred around the core legal frameworks for cybercrime regulation, ranging from the UN Cybercrime Convention to the domestic substance-specific Acts. The second task is a 2,500 word critique of a response from a Large Language Model Generative AI, to be completed at the end of the semester. Students are given the output from a prompt devised by the module lead. Students will be expected to fill out a report based on a provided template, identifying any strengths of the output, along with its weaknesses, and identification of all hallucinations. Students will end the report with a series of recommendations on how the prompt could be revised to improve the quality and reliability of the answer. The three-hour workshop will be a skills based session preparing students for this assessment.

Timetable