Prof. Stuart Macdonald
Professor Stuart Macdonald studied Law at the Universities of Cambridge (BA) and Southampton (PhD). In 2005, he joined Swansea University, where he was appointed Professor in 2016. He is co-director of the University’s £7.6m EPSRC CHERISH Digital Economy Centre (http://www.cherish-de.uk/) and the multidisciplinary Cyberterrorism Project (http://www.cyberterrorism-project.org/). Macdonald is the author of Text, Cases and Materials on Criminal Law (Pearson, 2015) and co-editor of Terrorists’ Use of the Internet: Assessment and Response (IOS Press, 2017), Violent Extremism Online: New Perspectives on Terrorism and the Internet (Routledge, 2016), Terrorism Online: Politics, Law and Technology (Routledge, 2015) and Cyberterrorism: Understanding, Assessment and Response (Springer, 2014). He has previously received research funding from the British Academy and NATO’s Emerging Security Challenges Division, and has held visiting scholarships at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Université de Grenoble-Alpes, University of Sydney and Columbia University, New York. In 2016/17, he was the holder of a Fulbright Cyber Security Award.
This perspective critically examines some challenges posed to the rule of law and human rights by states’ use of data-driven learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems for identifying individuals presenting a threat to national security.
This perspective argues that despite the concern from researchers, policymakers, and the media about terrorist’s use of financial technologies, there is little empirical evidence of the adoption of widespread sophisticated financial plots.
This research paper retells the stories of an individual’s journey to join, dwell and fight for ISIS by examining Zafirr Golamaully’s series of blogs called ‘Dusty Feet’.