Explorations in feminist participant-led research: Conducting focus group discussion with polyamorous women

This paper addresses the methodology used in research centring on a group of polyamorous women. It outlines the methodological processes of participant led research and highlights some key ethical and epistemological considerations. The research centred on a focus group discussion. Participants were involved in every stage of the research and the researcher / researched relationship was understood as one of collaboration. Participants had ownership of the research process in terms of generating discussion questions, facilitating the focus group discussion, and analysing the transcript. Their reflections on this process are also incorporated in this article. The paper focuses in particular on issues of accountability in participant led research and on reflexivity when researchers are part of the group they are researchin

Enhancing open and accountable government

This discussion paper has been prepared by an independent expert panel appointed by the Queensland Government to undertake a comprehensive review of the Queensland Freedom of Information Act 1992. The Panel was asked to prepare a discussion paper, for community consultation, and then a report with its recommendations. In conducting the review the Panel has examined relevant existing and proposed Commonwealth, State and Territory laws and practices as well as other recent reviews of freedom of information legislation, nationally and internationally. Issues raised in the discussion paper include: the purposes and principles of FOI; the exemption provisions; the administration of FOI in Queensland; time and costs of applications; review mechanisms; and the role of the Information Commissioner

Guarding the Guardians? Towards an Independent, Accountable and Diverse Senior Judiciary

At the heart of what Vernon Bogdanor has described as the ‘The New British Constitution’ has been the rise in the political significance of the judiciary. The explosion in judicial review of government decisions, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law and the move to a new Supreme Court have all contributed to an extended process of increasing judicial power vis-a-vis the other limbs of state. This emergence of a more powerful judicial branch of government has been essential in providing a restraint on executive power and in the admirable protection of individual and minority rights. However, it also raises significant issues. At the core of Britain’s unwritten constitution lies the concept of legitimacy as an underpinning for the rule of law. It is a basic premise in a mature democracy that those wielding power in the political sphere must – if this power is to be fully legitimate – also be in some way accountable to and representative of those from whom that power is derived and on whose behalf it is held. This raises a pressing question in relation to the necessarily unelected judicial branch of government: ‘who guards the guardians?’ Or perhaps more accurately, how can one ‘guard the guardians’ without undermining the central principle of judicial independence? It also raises the important interconnected question of how the composition of the judiciary – in terms of its relationship to the diverse make-up of the society it serves – impacts on this concept of legitimacy. These are in no way purely legal or technical issues but ones concerning the fundamental distribution and exercise of power in our democracy in which we all have a stake. The crux to resolving them lies in establishing a constitutionally appropriate system by which judges – and particularly the senior judges – are appointed. This paper will argue that the current system for senior judicial appointments is not fit for purpose. It will argue that an appropriate process requires a rebalancing between three guiding constitutional principles for judicial appointments: independence, accountability and diversity. Establishing such a process will enhance not only the democratic legitimacy of the system as a whole but also – importantly – the authority of the judges themselves and the crucial role they perform. Specifically: The paper examines the factors contributing to the expanded constitutional role of the judiciary. It argues that, while of real societal value, the process has led to an increasingly porous boundary between legal and political decision-making and this should not be ignored. Instead, the enhanced judicial role should be placed on a more solid footing, buttressed by a constitutionally appropriate system of senior judicial appointments. The paper then examines the current appointments process. It argues that the dominant extent to which the senior judiciary are involved in the appointment of the senior judiciary is inappropriate. It is of no disrespect to the eminent and high calibre individuals involved to recognise that, in a democracy, no branch of government should be potentially self-perpetuating. Democratic legitimacy requires a degree of involvement of elected officials in the appointment of those adjudicating on the laws passed by elected officials. The significant diversity deficit in the senior judiciary is then examined. The paper argues that diversity in senior judicial appointments is not simply a desirable goal, but a fundamental constitutional principle. At the very heart of the legitimacy of an independent judiciary are its claims to be able to deliver ‘fairness’. A senior judiciary whose composition reflects an apparent lack of fairness runs the real risk of undermining its own authority. Diversity also impacts directly on the substantive delivery of justice. Judicial decisions are unavoidably influenced by judicial background and perspective, particularly in relation to the arguable points of law before the highest courts. The law of the land constitutes the collective moral code of society. A key aspect of the competence of the Supreme Court, as a collective decision-making body, is that it should be imbued with (and be able to relate to) the broad array of perspectives and experiences that contribute to that society. The institutional competence or ‘merit’ of such a court is significantly weakened if this is not the case. The paper looks to draw lessons on senior judicial appointments from an international perspective by identifying mechanisms that have been introduced in other jurisdictions to enhance judicial accountability (while preserving judicial independence) and improve judicial diversity. In particular, it argues that the debate must move on from the reductive tendency to look only as far as the Senate confirmation hearing in the USA. The paper outlines proposals to address the democratic deficit in senior judicial appointments. It recommends a move away from the present system of ad hoc appointing commissions with a predominating judicial influence towards a more enduring, expanded senior judicial appointments commission, with a balanced input from the senior judiciary, cross-party parliamentarians and lay members. This would be designed to enhance legitimacy without allowing any group a disproportionate sway. It will also argue that an appropriately designed system of postappointment parliamentary hearings should be introduced for newly appointed Supreme Court Justices (drawing on the process used in Canada). The purpose of these hearings would not be to alter or impact on the nomination but to facilitate a dialogue between parliament and the senior judiciary and allow the British public the opportunity to learn about those holding real power in their society. The paper then outlines proposals to address the diversity deficit in senior judicial appointments. In particular, it calls for a reconsideration of the approach to the concept of ‘merit’ in relation to appointments to the highest courts. It argues that the prevailing emphasis on (and exaltation of) one relentlessly individualised understanding of merit is inappropriate for appointments to the Supreme Court (as it would be for any collective court or body). Instead, the collective competence of the Court should play a central role in appointments to it, allowing for the correction of any corporate deficiencies such as the absence of particular legal specialisms or an imbalance in the membership of the court in terms of diversity of experience. With this, a candidate will – importantly – only be appointed if they are the best candidate. They will be the best candidate because they best reflect what would be most beneficial to the Court and, as a result, the society it serves

A Roundtable Discussion With Stephen L. Carter & Michael J. Gerhardt

Transcript of a discussion regarding the United States Supreme Court, the Supreme Court justices and justice nominees, the Senate process for confirming nominees and related issues such as fitness to serve on the court and judicial activism

Privacy and security protection in cloud integrated sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed in many social settings to monitor human activities and urban environment. In these contexts, they acquire and collect sensory data, and collaboratively fuse the data. Due to resource constraint, sensor nodes however cannot perform complex data processing. Hence, cloud-integrated sensor networks have been proposed to leverage the cloud computing capabilities for processing vast amount of heterogeneous sensory data. After being processed, the sensory data can then be accessed and shared among authorized users and applications pervasively. Various security and privacy threats can arise when the people-centric sensory data is collected and transmitted within the sensor network or from the network to the cloud; security and privacy remain a big concern when the data is later accessed and shared among different users and applications after being processed. Extensive research has been conducted to address the security and privacy issues without sacrificing resource efficiency. Unfortunately, the goals of security/privacy protection and resource efficiency may not be easy to accomplish simultaneously, and may even be sharply contrary to each other. Our research aims to reconcile the conflicts between these goals in several important contexts. Specifically, we first investigate the security and privacy protection of sensory data being transmitted within the sensor network or from the sensor network to the cloud, which includes: (1) efficient, generic privacy preserving schemes for sensory data aggregation; (2) a privacy-preserving integrity detection scheme for sensory data aggregation; (3) an efficient and source-privacy preserving scheme for catching packet droppers and modifiers. Secondly, we further study how to address people\u27s security and privacy concerns when accessing sensory data from the cloud. To preserve privacy for sensory data aggregation, we propose a set of generic, efficient and collusion-resilient privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes. On top of these privacy preserving schemes, we also develop a scheme to simultaneously achieve privacy preservation and detection of integrity attack for data aggregation. Our approach outperforms existing solutions in terms of generality, node compromise resilience, and resource efficiency. To remove the negative effects caused by packet droppers and modifiers, we propose an efficient scheme to identify and catch compromised nodes which randomly drop packets and/or modify packets. The scheme employs an innovative packet marking techniques, with which selective packet dropping and modification can be significantly alleviated while the privacy of packet sources can be preserved. To preserve the privacy of people accessing the sensory data in the cloud, we propose a new efficient scheme for resource constrained devices to verify people\u27s access privilege without exposing their identities in the presence of outsider attacks or node compromises; to achieve the fine-grained access control for data sharing, we design privacy-preserving schemes based on users\u27 affiliated attributes, such that the access policies can be flexibly specified and enforced without involving complicated key distribution and management overhead. Extensive analysis, simulations, theoretical proofs and implementations have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed schemes. The results show that our proposed schemes resolve several limitations of existing work and achieve better performance in terms of resource efficiency, security strength and privacy preservation

All Health Care Is Local: Exploring the Roles of Cities and States in Health Care Delivery and Reform Industry Panel

A transcript of the Industry Perspectives panel discussion held during the Belmont Health Law Journal 2018 Symposium: “All Health Care is Local: Exploring the Roles of Cities and States in Health Care Delivery and Reform”

Evaluating On-demand Pseudonym Acquisition Policies in Vehicular Communication Systems

Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of shortterm credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the user privacy and the system performance and possibly, as a result, its security. In this paper, we make a novel systematic effort to address this multifaceted question. We craft three generally applicable policies and experimentally evaluate the VPKI system performance, leveraging two large-scale mobility datasets. We consider the most promising, in terms of efficiency, pseudonym acquisition policies; we find that within this class of policies, the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead. Moreover, in all cases, this work is the first to provide tangible evidence that the state-of-the-art VPKI can serve sizable areas or domain with modest computing resources.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, IoV-VoI'1

Restoring a Public Interest Vision of Law in the Age of the Internet

In November 2003, Mr. Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, lectured at Duke Law School on the importance of protecting individual privacy. In his remarks, Mr. Rotenberg recounted the successful campaign against the government\u27s Clipper Chip proposal. He argued that successful public interest advocacy in the Internet age requires the participation of experts from many fields, public engagement, and a willingness to avoid a simple balancing analysis. He further concluded that privacy may be one of the defining issues of a free society in the twenty-first century