The launch of Cybersecurity, Privacy and Data Protection in EU Law. An analysis of laws, policies and technology by Dr Maria Grazia Porcedda and published by Hart Publishing, a Bloomsbury imprint, took place in the Senior Common Room at Trinity College Dublin on April 19he 2023. The book launch was supported by PSAI’s Book Launch fund.
The launch began with a speech by TJ McIntyre, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s Sutherland Law School and Chairman of the advocacy group Digital Rights Ireland and Dave Lewis, Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Computing, Director of the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group (KDEG) and Acting Director of ADAPT, the Irish Center for AI-Powered Digital Content Technology. Speakers noted that the book is the first to cover the interplay between fundamental rights and the nascent field of cybersecurity law and policy, and praised the relevance of its methodology and findings to other policy areas, such as Artificial Intelligence.
The launch was moderated by Mark Bell, Regius Professor of Law and Acting Director of the School, and ended with a keynote address by the author, Maria Grazia Porcedda, who discussed how the book came to life and explained its key message. On the occasion, colleagues, friends and relatives gathered to learn more about the book, copies of which were made available by the Law Library.
About the book
‘Cybersecurity, Privacy and Data Protection in EU Law. A Law, Policy and Technology Analysis’ investigates how cybersecurity, privacy and data protection, ‘the triad’, interact and can be reconciled within the European Union. The EU’s institutional and legal framework prohibits zero-sum games between security and rights and allows for different modes of coexistence, which the book explores.
The book takes a holistic approach by investigating cybersecurity, privacy and data protection individually and their relationship in all areas of EU policy making along three axes: politics, law and technology. Therefore, the book explores how the interplay between the triad plays out in major policy documents and more than fifteen legal instruments. In essence, the book analyzes cybersecurity, privacy and data protection as techno-legal objects: given the common denominator of cyberspace, data and information, all instruments must eventually be translated into some kind of technological application. Such a level is dominated by informal and voluntary mechanisms that have distorting effects on politics and law.
Thus, the book discovers a series of dynamics, such as the disappearance of the technology of the law and the indeterminacy loop, that force the relationship between cybersecurity, privacy and data protection to a balancing act that, although is procedurally correct, substantially exposes the triad to the risk of zero-sum gaming, and jeopardizes the achievement of cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection. The book calls for a new commitment to legislation at the technology level, which is challenging amid tensions over geopolitical competition over technology and cyber sovereignty, but one that should be attempted nonetheless.
Dr. Maria Grazia Porcedda is Assistant Professor of Information Technology Law at Trinity College Dublin Law School.
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