Underground web: the cybercrime challenge

The two papers in this Special Report examine the central role that cybercrime plays in modern society and how technological developments create new opportunities for criminals to exploit. Overview Calum Jeffray’s paper, Caught in the net: the law enforcement response to international cybercrime, surveys the strategic cybercrime landscape and illustrates that, despite calls for law enforcement to ‘do more’ to prevent and investigate cybercrime, the agencies involved are often hampered in acting due to jurisdictional issues or the complexity of the investigations. Tobias Feakin’s paper, Cryptomarkets—illicit goods in the darknet, examines the emergence of the ‘darknet’, where trading in illicit goods and services in online black markets has become increasingly commonplace and exacerbates the problems that law enforcement already faces—tracing and prosecuting illegal activities online. This Special Report includes a foreword by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin

Social Indicators for Arctic Mining

This paper reviews and assesses the state of the data to describe and monitor mining trends in the pan-Arctic. It constructs a mining index and discusses its value as a social impact indicator and discusses drivers of change in Arctic mining. The widely available measures of mineral production and value are poor proxies for economic effects on Arctic communities. Trends in mining activity can be characterized as stasis or decline in mature regions of the Arctic, with strong growth in the frontier regions. World prices and the availability of large, undiscovered and untapped resources with favorable access and low political risk are the biggest drivers for Arctic mining, while climate change is a minor and locally variable factor. Historical data on mineral production and value is unavailable in electronic format for much of the Arctic, specifically Scandinavia and Russia; completing the historical record back to 1980 will require work with paper archives. The most critically needed improvement in data collection and reporting is to develop comparable measures of employment: the eight Arctic countries each use different definitions of employment, and different methodologies to collect the data. Furthermore, many countries do not report employment by county and industry, so the Arctic share of mining employment cannot be identified. More work needs to be done to develop indicator measures for ecosystem service flows. More work also needs to be done developing conceptual models of effects of mining activities on fate control, cultural continuity and ties to nature for local Arctic communities

Calling Brussels:An Innovative Teaching Project

This innovative teaching project brought students and professionals working at or with the European Union (EU) together via video-conferencing. The idea was that by having students talk to policymakers this would add to their understanding of the EU and allow them to practice their interview skills. These interviews would be incorporated in a regular first-year course on the political system of the EU. Students had to do the necessary research and prepare questions beforehand. Introducing this activity to the course made it more interactive, gave students a more practical orientation and added yet another international element to the already international group of students. In political science and legal courses there is rarely time for field research. Including long-distance interviews added an element of qualitative research with real persons, who are involved in EU policy making. Students not only had to prepare for the interviews but also practiced their research skills under realistic conditions (with a stranger who is an expert on a certain subject). It also contributed to the fulfillment of the Bologna agenda goals of internationalization and digitalization

Dealing with big data

No abstract available