Lorena Bachmaier Winter - Investigating and Preventing Crime in the Digital Era: New Safeguards, New Rights

The main purpose of this book series is to provide sound analyses of major developments in national, EU and international law and case law, as well as insights into court practice and legislative proposals in the areas concerned. The analyses address a broad readership, such as lawyers and practitioners, while also providing guidance for courts. In terms of scope, the series encompasses four main areas, the first of which concerns international criminal law and especially international case law in relevant criminal law subjects. The second addresses international human rights law with a particular focus on the impact of international jurisprudences on national criminal law and criminal justice systems, as well as their interrelations. In turn the third area focuses on European criminal law and case law. Here, particular weight will be attached to studies on European criminal law conducted from a comparative perspective. The fourth and final area presents surveys of comparative criminal law inside and outside Europe. By combining these various aspects, the series especially highlights research aimed at proposing new legal solutions, while focusing on the new challenges of a European area based on high standards of human rights protection.

As a rule, book proposals are subject to peer review, which is carried out by two members of the editorial board in anonymous form.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Even if in the field of technology and law, there is always the risk that some innovative analysis might rapidly become outdated because of the speedy evolution of technology, we are convinced that it is worth to assume such risk and try to address the present challenges the digitalization of our lives poses for the law. Only by doing this, it will be possible to understand the future developments and, at the same time, to provide some guidance to the practitioners that have to deal with the problems originated by the use of technological devices by intelligence units, law enforcement and criminal investigators as well as criminals. And, as we all know, the legal solutions in many of these areas are lagging behind.

This is not new. It is well known that much of the technological development in the field of communications technology and the gathering and processing of data has been fostered within the field of national security and the military for preventing attacks and establishing a defensive strategy, but also to be able to counterattack war threats. And in many cases only later, when these technologies have become accessible to the citizense.g., the use of drones or the Skype video-communication programlawmakers have started to adjust legal frameworks to the needs and limits of the digital investigation.

This development has changed completely the way human beings communicate and behave in the present digital world, allowing to obtain a huge amount of data of every individual which provides information of almost every aspect of his or her life. In this new scenario, the challenge may lie in finding the right way to protect the right to privacy of individuals, whatever this may mean in the present world.

The aim of this book is to delve into the impact of the ICTs in the criminal prevention and investigation, by addressing the state of the art of different measures and its implementation in different legal systems vis vis the protection of human rights. Yet this research not only pursues a diagnostic goal but furthermore aims at providing a reconstruction of this problematic area in light of modern, human rights-oriented notion of criminal justice. This broadens the scope of this investigation, which encompasses both unprecedented safeguards to traditional, or anyway widely recognized individual rights and the emergence of new rights, such as the right to informational self-determination, and the right to information technology privacy, but also new rights as the neuro-rights or the rights in the outer space.