The Introduction sketches the main technological and legal challenges LEAs face in criminal investigations when seeking to collect electronic evidence in the digital era. It gives an overview of the relevant legal framework at EU, Council of Europe and international level, including recent developments such as the e-Evidence Regulation and the Second Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention, and identifies some missing pieces of the puzzle. Next, the chapter explains the main research objectives of this handbook, before presenting its overall structure and introducing the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 6 looks at how, in democratic societies, the regimes of data collection for the purposes of national security and law enforcement have traditionally been strictly separated. Yet, in the last two decades, complex challenges such as organised crime and terrorism have blurred the border between them, raising concerns about the use of data collected by intelligence agencies as evidence in criminal investigations. The chapter examines issues related to exchange of information between national security and criminal justice domains. It discusses problems associated with the inherent imbalance in aims, functions and safeguards between the two regimes. While considering the exchange of data between intelligence agencies and law enforcement inevitable, the chapter argues that the differences between the regimes create a danger of using national security frameworks to circumvent strict safeguards established in criminal procedure law. It suggests that robust safeguards and measures for accountability and oversight must become an integral part of frameworks that enable and facilitate data flows from the national security domain to criminal investigations.

Digital traces that people leave behind can be useful evidence in criminal courts. However, in many jurisdictions, the legal provisions setting the rules for the use of evidence in criminal courts were formulated long before these digital technologies existed, and there seems to be an increasing discrepancy between legal frameworks and actual practices. This chapter investigates this disconnect by analyzing the relevant legal frameworks in the EU for processing data in criminal courts, and comparing and contrasting these with actual court practices. The relevant legal frameworks are criminal and data protection law. Data protection law is mostly harmonized throughout the EU, but since criminal law is mostly national law, this chapter focuses on criminal law in the Netherlands. We conclude that existing legal frameworks do not appear to obstruct the collection of data for evidence, but that regulation on collection in criminal law and regulation on processing and analysis in data protection law are not integrated. We also characterize as remarkable the almost complete absence of regulation of automated data analysis – in contrast with the many rules for data collection.

Chapter 2 offers a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the scapegoat in organizations. In such contexts, it would not be credible for the scapegoats to be extraneous to the event that they are blamed for. It is therefore an individual, or a group of individuals, in some way involved in the event, who are blamed. They are an instrument of organizational rationality, strategically deployed by the organization to avoid any legal consequences and economic damage. Nevertheless, scapegoating also benefits the managers of the organization because their personal reputation can be damaged by their association with a tainted organization. The chapter presents some situations that can favor the creation of scapegoats: accidents, business scandals, organizational failures, crises, and policy fiascos. These events, particularly if amplified by the media, tend to generate scapegoats with the greatest frequency.