The use of information and telecommunication networks for criminal purposes: regulatory accounting and prospects for expanding criminal law authority

Abstract

The rapid digital transformation of crime determines the high importance of criminal law regulation, which, according to some scholars, requires modernization to ensure a stricter state censure of persons encroaching on security in the information and communication space. Critically assessing this proposal, whose implementation will entail numerous norms that are constructively inconsistent with the requirements of non-characteristic property of a qualifying feature for acts, which threatens to artificially increase the danger of crime, the author proposes to amend the law, ensuring a unified definition of the relevant objective feature. The totality and multivariability of the use of information and telecommunication networks for criminal purposes actualizes the issue of determining the boundaries within which the involvement of communication reserves of the relevant technologies will form a mechanism for a criminal act, the significance of which has increased due to the broad interpretation by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of the relevant objective feature in relation to the composition paragraph "b" part 2 Article 228.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The systematic implementation of the law may serve as a basis for a broad definition of this feature also within the framework of other compositions, posing a threat of judicial penalization of acts. The repressive nature of criminal law regulation precludes hasty reforming of the law, devoid of criminological substantiation. The decision to expand the differentiating meaning of the analyzed objective feature may be dictated by the emergence in society of social relations that are not regulated by law, giving rise to acts that pose danger, or to ensure a unified normative definition of related criminal acts. The methodological basis is made up of general scientific (analysis and synthesis, dialectics) and private scientific research methods (criminal-statistical, systemic structural, formal legal).