What type of court has jurisdiction for cyber cases?

Answer 1

The court that has jurisdiction depends on the type of case and the laws of the state or country where the issue occurred. It gets even more complicated when the issue crosses national state or national boundaries. In general there are three kinds of cases: civil, criminal, and national security.

Civil cases deal with when someone does damage to you through cyber methods. It might be theft of information, corruption to the information of your system, or denying you access to your cyber resources. Civil cases seek to get the responsible party to pay for the damage they did. It would include cases of commercial espionage where business information is stolen, damage to the reputation of a company, stealing your personal information, intruding on your privacy, stealing resources for unauthorized use, erasing the database containing billing information, launching a denial of service (DOS) attack against a company, or any of a multitude of other damaging actions. Civil courts have jurisdiction in these kind of cases.

Criminal cases are those where a law has been violated. Because of the complexity of what you can do in the cyber universe there are a lot of very unethical and dishonest things people can do that are not technically illegal but are still fundamentally wrong. There are also a lot of perfectly legitimate things that people do that can run them afoul of laws that are either poorly written or deliberately written to grant power to repressive political regimes. China, North Korea, and Middle Eastern countries are notorious for making legitimate cyber activities illegal, but even countries that consider themselves to be free and enlightened are often guilty of passing laws that make reasonable actions illegal. Because of the complexities of what can be done, governments struggle to find a balance. Criminal cases almost always fall under the jurisdiction of criminal courts. Note that in many instances criminal cases have legitimate victims who can follow up the criminal case with another case filed in civil courts.

The third situation is cases that involve national security. Technically these cases are usually criminal, but sometimes the law lags behind the problems that deal with national security and special courts are required to address them. They can also involve activities conducted by military personnel which are dealt with by military courts outside the usual civil and criminal courts. Depending on the jurisdiction, national security cases may fall under the jurisdiction of special courts or review boards who only have power to revoke security clearances, military courts that impose penalties only for those working for the military, or, in some jurisdictions, tribunals run by government security forces.

To make this more general, we probably should also include religious courts for those areas where a violation may not be against the law of the land but is considered a violation of the tenets or principles of the dominant local religion. Some countries grant religious courts power to enforce their beliefs independent of the rest of the government. In some cases these courts only have jurisdiction over those who are officially members of the religion. In other places, they can enforce their beliefs on all people within the country. An example would be punishing someone who posted an article on-line critical of a member of the clergy or posting something in a blog that the religion considers heresy.