Surveillance, Privacy and Security

This volume examines the relationship between privacy, surveillance and security, and the alleged privacy–security trade-off, focusing on the citizen’s perspective. Recent revelations of mass surveillance programmes clearly demonstrate the ever-increasing capabilities of surveillance technologies. The lack of serious reactions to these activities shows that the political will to implement them appears to be an unbroken trend. The resulting move into a surveillance society is, however, contested for many reasons. Are the resulting infringements of privacy and other human rights compatible with democratic societies? Is security necessarily depending on surveillance? Are there alternative ways to frame security? Is it possible to gain in security by giving up civil liberties, or is it even necessary to do so, and do citizens adopt this trade-off? This volume contributes to a better and deeper understanding of the relation between privacy, surveillance and security, comprising in-depth investigations and studies of the common narrative that more security can only come at the expense of sacrifice of privacy. The book combines theoretical research with a wide range of empirical studies focusing on the citizen’s perspective. It presents empirical research exploring factors and criteria relevant for the assessment of surveillance technologies. The book also deals with the governance of surveillance technologies. New approaches and instruments for the regulation of security technologies and measures are presented, and recommendations for security policies in line with ethics and fundamental rights are discussed. This book will be of much interest to students of surveillance studies, critical security studies, intelligence studies, EU politics and IR in general. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 license.

Raising the Impact of Education Research in Africa

The low demonstrable effect of education research done in South Africa in particular – and Africa in general – continues to be a problem in scientific records in the educational sciences. This scholarly collected work addresses this obstacle and focuses on recommendations from scholars in different sectorial categories in the field of education. Scholars from a variety of sub-fields within the educational sciences reflect on this particular matter, revisiting the history of research and research outcomes and offering informed recommendations based on in-depth investigation and analysis of aspects of the various discourses within the relevant sub-fields. The scope of the content of this collected work centres on the issue of the lack of scientific records concerning the scientific raising of the impact of education research. The book aims at making a specific contribution to the educational sciences by stimulating scholarly discussion around how to increase the recording of the significance of educational research done in Africa, and in South Africa in particular, and to redirect the research agenda into the direction of making more impact. Impact is conceptualised to mean both scholarly impact (that is being cited and being used as foundation for theory building and for further research) and practical impact (that is improvement of practice, teaching and learning in education institutions at all levels)

The progress of anomie in Australia between 2001 and 2011

The fundamental social structures of Australia and the Western world in the modern era differ greatly from those of fin de siècle France and the post-Depression industrialised West; yet, similar individual human responses to stressors remain. The sociological insights of Émile Durkheim and Robert Merton presented in their theories of Anomie and Strain provide a guide to understanding this. The present research considered the confluence of pressures that flowed from the changes to social structures in Australia after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, in an environment in which people felt increasingly unsettled and insecure. It positioned the changes within the global context of a broad range of social and structural developments in the Western world. This thesis argues that one of the responses to upheavals and disorder is increased levels of punitiveness, one of the reactions described by the Strain theory that extended our understanding of the behavioural responses of people living in a state of Anomie. Starting in January 2001, a study of the attitudes of the Australian population to crime and punishment is used as evidence for this contention. The attitudes are discoverable through the records of the print media and the Legislatures from two periods a decade apart, 2001 and 2011, and across two Australian jurisdictions, Western Australia and Victoria. The analysis of these records identified a complex interconnection of three equally powerful elements: the media, the Legislature and the public. From this, the model of the Triangle of Power was developed to illustrate how each element reflects both the community mood and incites it. As postulated, the results of the analysis of both sets of data verified an increase in punitiveness that confirmed the existence of Anomie in the early twenty-first century which was revealed through

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data