From Protecting Lives to Protecting States: Use of Force Across the Threat Continuum

The increasing prominence in recent years of non-international armed conflicts that extend across state borders has strained the traditional legal categories that we use to regulate state use of force. Simultaneous with this phenomenon has been growing acceptance that human rights law and international humanitarian law should co-exist, with the former informing interpretations of the latter to varying degrees. Scholars continue to debate vigorously the implications of these developments and how these bodies of law should interact. As Kenneth Watkin’s book Fighting at the Legal Boundaries: Controlling the Use of Force in Contemporary Conflict observes, however, commanders have no choice but to navigate these ambiguities and attempt to reconcile these tensions on the operational level as they engage in hostilities. Watkin’s magisterial book can be seen both as a work of operational law and a major scholarly treatment of the law governing the use of force. It provides detailed accounts of how situations arise on the ground that evade easy classification in terms of our existing conceptual and legal categories. At the same time, it furnishes a valuable framework for analyzing the features of such operations that are relevant in assessing how force should be used in particular scenarios. Finally, Watkin offers a set of principles for both operational law and broader policy decisions to help navigate the complex terrain of modern security challenges. Watkin argues that the twenty-first century approach to conflict must be “holistic” in nature. On the one hand, it must it must acknowledge “the simultaneous application of humanitarian and human rights law,” and the greater influence of the latter in shaping perceptions of the legitimacy of violence. On the other hand, it must appreciate that “the altered security environment of this century has witnessed a definite move away from looking at conflict itself as being uniquely conventional or unconventional,” as transnational non-state organized armed groups have emerged that do not resemble traditional armed forces. This review essay describes the main ideas in Watkin’s rich and comprehensive analysis. It then focuses in more detail on two of his suggestions. The first is that state forces should presumptively operate under law enforcement rules until this is insufficient to meet a threat, even in the course of an armed conflict. This reflects the incorporation of human rights principles as a default policy even when more permissive rules on use of force are available. The second suggestion is that certain hostile engagements with non-state forces may appropriately be characterized as armed conflicts of limited duration, governed by international humanitarian law. These two proposals reflect his view that characterization of the nature of hostilities should depend upon facts on the ground, specifically the nature of the means that states must use in order effectively to deal with a threat. I then discuss whether this approach should lead to assessments of state use of force that rely on contextual analysis of the weight of the interests at stake in a given situation, rather than on classification of hostilities in one of our two traditional main legal categories. While Watkin does not take this step, I analyze the work of others who make a cogent argument that we should. Ultimately, I conclude that our existing imperfect legal framework is preferable to a purely contextual approach, because of the radically different moral universes that animate human rights law and international humanitarian law

BlueSky: Combining Task Planning and Activity-Centric Access Control for Assistive Humanoid Robots

In the not too distant future, assistive humanoid robots will provide versatile assistance for coping with everyday life. In their interactions with humans, not only safety, but also security and privacy issues need to be considered. In this Blue Sky paper, we therefore argue that it is time to bring task planning and execution as a well-established field of robotics with access and usage control in the field of security and privacy closer together. In particular, the recently proposed activity-based view on access and usage control provides a promising approach to bridge the gap between these two perspectives. We argue that humanoid robots provide for specific challenges due to their task-universality and their use in both, private and public spaces. Furthermore, they are socially connected to various parties and require policy creation at runtime due to learning. We contribute first attempts on the architecture and enforcement layer as well as on joint modeling, and discuss challenges and a research roadmap also for the policy and objectives layer. We conclude that the underlying combination of decentralized systems\u27 and smart environments\u27 research aspects provides for a rich source of challenges that need to be addressed on the road to deployment

Electronic institutions with normative environments for agent-based E-contracting

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Structuring the Scope: Enabling Adaptive and Multilateral Authorization Management

In this work, we examine an access scope, a concept in authorization management broadly applied for the specification of access constraints in web service integrations. By analyzing a typical use-case of cross-organizational cloud service automation, we show the suboptimal capabilities of static, coarse-grained and inflexible scopes that negatively impact security and management of service integrations on a web scale. Using the graph-based structure that relies on semantic technologies we introduce dereferenceable and selfdescriptive authorization extents that allow expressive, granular and dynamic specification of security requirements. Through its application in the running scenario, we show how this construct can be administered to support confidentiality, integrity and privacy requirements of service integrations by allowing selective information sharing based on contextual properties

Context-Based Access for Infrequent Requests in Tanzania\u27s Health Care System

Access control is an important aspect of any information system. It is a way of ensuring that users can only access what they are authorised to and no more. This can be achieved by granting users access to resources based on pre-defined organisational and legislative rules. Although access control has been extensively studied, and as a result, a wide range of access control models, mechanisms and systems have been proposed, specific access control requirements for healthcare systems that needs to support the continuity of care in an accountable manner have not been addressed. This results in a gap between what is required by the application domain and what is actually practised, and thus access control solutions implemented for the domain become too restrictive. The continuity of care is defined as the delivery of seamless health care services to patients through integration, coordination and sharing of information between providers. This thesis, therefore, designs a context-based access control model that allows healthcare professionals to bypass access rules in an accountable manner in case of an infrequent access request involving an emergency situation. This research uses the Tanzania\u27s healthcare system as a case study domain

Modeling Support for Role-Based Delegation in Process-Aware Information Systems

In the paper, an integrated approach for the modeling and enforcement of delegation policies in process-aware information systems is presented. In particular, a delegation extension for process-related role-based access control (RBAC) models is specified. The extension is generic in the sense that it can be used to extend process-aware information systems or process modeling languages with support for processrelated RBAC delegationmodels.Moreover, the detection of delegation-related conflicts is discussed and a set of pre-defined resolution strategies for each potential conflict is provided. Thereby, the design-time and runtime consistency of corresponding RBAC delegation models can be ensured. Based on a formal metamodel, UML2 modeling support for the delegation of roles, tasks, and duties is provided. A corresponding case study evaluates the practical applicability of the approach with real-world business processes. Moreover, the approach is implemented as an extension to the BusinessActivity library and runtime engine

Regulatory technologies for the study of data and platform power in the app economy

Tracking, the large-scale collection of data about user behaviour, is commonplace in mobile apps. While some see tracking as a necessary evil to making apps available at lower prices by showing users personalised advertising and selling their data to third parties, tracking can also have highly disproportionate effects on the lives of individuals and society as a whole. For example, tracking has significant effects on the rights to privacy and data protection, but also on other fundamental rights, such as the right to non-discrimination (e.g. when data from mobile tracking is used in AI systems, such as targeted ads for job offers) or the right to free and fair elections (e.g. when political microtargeting is used, as in the Brexit vote or the Trump election). This thesis develops and applies techno-legal methods to study choice over app tracking at four levels: the impact of the GDPR (Chapter 4), consent to tracking in apps (Chapter 5), differences between Android and iOS (Chapters 6), and the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework (Chapter 7). While many previous studies looked at data protection and privacy in apps, few studies analysed tracking over time, took a compliance angle, or looked at iOS apps at scale. Throughout our analysis of apps, we find compliance problems within apps as regards key aspects of US, EU and UK data protection and privacy law, particularly the need to seek consent before tracking. For instance, while user consent is usually required prior to tracking in the EU and UK (under the ePrivacy Directive), our empirical findings suggest that tracking takes place widely and usually without users’ awareness or explicit agreement. This thesis contributes 1) a scalable downloading and analysis framework for iOS and Android privacy and compliance analysis (PlatformControl), 2) an improved understanding of the legal requirements and empirical facts regarding app tracking, 3) a comprehensive database of the relations between companies in the app ecosystem (X-Ray 2020), and 4) an Android app to support the easy and independent analysis of apps’ privacy practices (TrackerControl)