Teaching, study and research - access to materials relating to terrorism

“Restricted materials” means any materials that could be construed as illegal or raise suspicion of criminality by the police or the security forces. This could include, but is not restricted to sensitive details relating to:

• Proscribed terrorist organisations or terrorist activity (for example researching the names of people linked to proscribed organisations; watching beheading videos)
• Material that is not publicly available, held in restricted collections/archives or accessed via the dark web; insurgent groups’ propaganda materials accessed via the dark web
• Publicly available materials – social media, insurgent groups’ openly published propaganda materials, accessed via normal search engines
• The sex trade (for example information relating to sex workers including accessing blocked websites)
• Pornography and/or sexual abuse
• Human trafficking or the smuggling of migrants
• Child abuse
• Research into illegal drugs
• Other criminal activities along the lines of the above

The code of conduct for access to restricted materials applies to any student, academic, or other member of staff who will be accessing such materials in the course of their teaching, study or research.

Students, academics, or other members of staff should complete and submit the Access to Restricted Materials Request Form under the following circumstances, to ensure that access is approved by IT, and to allow the University to protect such users from undue investigation:

• If you are about to commence new research, teaching or study that will require you to access such materials
• If you are already undertaking research, teaching or study that requires you to access such materials, and you have not previously completed a notification form.

The Code of conduct for access to restricted materials has been developed for the following reasons:

1. To ensure that a process is in place for your supervisor or ethics committee to confirm that there are no ethical concerns or disproportionate risk to you or others by accessing such materials
2. To notify the University IT Security team that access has been reviewed and approved, and therefore avoid any unneccessary access revocation or investigation internally, and to allow guidance to be provided to you on data storage, and protection from viruses and other issues that can arise from using the dark web or accessing certain sites
3. Should an external investigation be triggered by the police or security services, this process will confirm that access was reviewed and approved for academic purposes

If you are not sure whether your teaching, research or study meets the criteria for the notification form, please speak to your college ethics committee in the first instance.