Adding Privacy Protection to Policy Based Authorisation Systems

An authorisation system determines who is authorised to do what i.e. it assigns privileges to users and provides a decision on whether someone is allowed to perform a requested action on a resource. A traditional authorisation decision system, which is simply called authorisation system or system in the rest of the thesis, provides the decision based on a policy which is usually written by the system administrator. Such a traditional authorisation system is not sufficient to protect privacy of personal data, since users (the data subjects) are usually given a take it or leave it choice to accept the controlling organisation’s policy. Privacy is the ability of the owners or subjects of personal data to control the flow of data about themselves, according to their own preferences. This thesis describes the design of an authorisation system that will provide privacy for personal data by including sticky authorisation policies from the issuers and data subjects, to supplement the authorisation policy of the controlling organisation. As personal data moves from controlling system to controlling system, the sticky policies travel with the data. A number of data protection laws and regulations have been formulated to protect the privacy of individuals. The rights and prohibitions provided by the law need to be enforced by the authorisation system. Hence, the designed authorisation system also includes the authorisation rules from the legislation. This thesis describes the conversion of rules from the EU Data Protection Directive into machine executable rules. Due to the nature of the legislative rules, not all of them could be converted into deterministic machine executable rules, as in several cases human intervention or human judgement is required. This is catered for by allowing the machine rules to be configurable. Since the system includes independent policies from various authorities (law, issuer, data subject and controller) conflicts may arise among the decisions provided by them. Consequently, this thesis describes a dynamic, automated conflict resolution mechanism. Different conflict resolution algorithms are chosen based on the request contexts. As the EU Data Protection Directive allows processing of personal data based on contracts, we designed and implemented a component, Contract Validation Service (ConVS) that can validate an XML based digital contract to allow processing of personal data based on a contract. The authorisation system has been implemented as a web service and the performance of the system is measured, by first deploying it in a single computer and then in a cloud server. Finally the validity of the design and implementation are tested against a number of use cases based on scenarios involving accessing medical data in a health service provider’s system and accessing personal data such as CVs and degree certificates in an employment service provider’s system. The machine computed authorisation decisions are compared to the theoretical decisions to ensure that the system returns the correct decisions

Private military and security companies, territoriality and the transformation of western security governance

The field of security governance holds a special place within the context of the debate over the diffusion of power from state to non-state actors, from national to international authorities and from governments to markets in Western democracies. Not only has the provision of the ‘public good’ security been considered one of the main functions of government, but also has it played a major role in justifying the centralization of power and authority within and by the nation-state (Krahmann, 2010; Leander 2006). The contemporary proliferation of private military and security companies, i.e. companies that sell armed and non-armed security services to public and private customers, poses a particular challenge to state-centric notions of national and global governance. This chapter seeks to examine the consequences of the diffusion of security governance functions among military and security companies in Europe and North America

Ghana TRIPS Over the TRIPS Agreement on Plant Breeders' Rights

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Thaddeus Manu, 'Ghana Trips Over the TRIPS Agreement on Plant Breeders' Rights', African Journal of Legal Studies, Vol 9 (1): 20-45, July 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 31 July 2019. The final, published version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/17087384-12342070. Published by BRILL.The premise under which the global IP system is validated has often focused on a traditional materialistic approach. While this seems to find legitimate support in economic reasoning, such a fundamental view also appears to contradict a related social norm claim which dictates that society ought to be shaped by appropriate values rather than economic rubrics. Although Ghana is not a signatory member of the UPOV Convention, there is explicit evidence that the PBRs Bill under consideration in Parliament contains provisions modelled on the UPOV Act 1991 rather than the potentially flexible and “effective sui generis system” in TRIPS. This paper aims to contribute to a recently active area of discussion on the topic by examining the consequences of stringent legislation on PBRs in the absence of adequate safeguard measures to protect public interests. Consequently, the hypothesis of this paper rests on the argument that every system needs checks and balances and the legislative system is no exception; therefore, social policy matters must be integrated into the so-called PBRs Bill in order not to undervalue public interests. To conclude, the author presents an argument based on a logical balance that ought to be found on the path to promulgating such legislation.Peer reviewe

Oil and international cooperation

The more that states depend on oil exports, the less cooperative they become: they grow less likely to join intergovernmental organizations, to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of international judicial bodies, and to agree to binding arbitration for investment disputes. This pattern is robust to the use of country and year fixed effects, to alternative measures of the key variables, and to the exclusion of all countries in the Middle East. To explain this pattern, we consider the economic incentives that foster participation in international institutions: the desire to attract foreign investment and to gain access to foreign markets. Oil-exporting states, we argue, find it relatively easy to achieve these aims without making costly commitments to international institutions. In other words, natural resource wealth liberates states from the economic pressures that would otherwise drive them toward cooperation

Towards a New Architecture for Financial Stability: Seven Principles

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financial regulation to study the optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that the new architecture should revolve around the following principles: (i) banking, securities and insurance supervision should be further integrated; (ii) macro prudential supervisory function must be in the hands of the central bank; (iii) the relation between macro and micro supervisors must be articulated through a management by exception system involving direct authority of the macro supervisor over enforcement and allocation of tasks; (iv) given the difficulty of measuring output on supervisory tasks, the systemic risk supervisor must necessarily be more accountable and less independent than Central Banks are on their monetary task; (v) the supervisory agency cannot rely on high powered incentives to motivate supervisors, and must rely on culture instead; (vi) the supervisor must limit its reliance on self regulation; and (vii) the international system should substitute the current loose, networked structure for a more centralized and hierarchical one.Banks, international financial markets, systematic risk

JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

Trade in the balance: reconciling trade and climate policy: report of the Working Group on Trade, Investment, and Climate Policy

This repository item contains a report published by the Working Group on Trade, Investment, and Climate Policy at The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, and the Global Economic Governance Initiative at Boston University.This report outlines the general tensions between the trade and investment regime and climate policy, and outlines a framework toward making trade and investment rules more climate friendly. Members of the working group have contributed short pieces addressing a range of issues related to the intersection of trade and climate policy. The first two are by natural scientists. Anthony Janetos discusses the need to address the effects of international trade on efforts to limit the increase in global annual temperature to no more than 2oC over preindustrial levels. James J. Corbett examines the failure of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to adequately address the environmental implications of shipping and maritime transport. The next two pieces are by economists who examine economic aspects of the trade-climate linkage. Irene Monasterolo and Marco Raberto discuss the potential impacts of including fossil fuel subsidies reduction under the TTIP. Frank Ackerman explores the economic costs of efforts to promote convergence of regulatory standards between the United States and the European Union under the TTIP. The following two contributions are by legal scholars. Brooke Güven and Lise Johnson explore the potential for international investment treaties to redirect investment flows to support climate change mitigation and adaptation, particularly with regard to China and India. Matt Porterfield provides an overview of the ways in which both existing and proposed trade and investment agreements could have either “climate positive” or “climate negative” effects on mitigation policies. The final article is by Tao Hu, a former WTO trade and environment expert advisor for China and currently at the World Wildlife Fund, arguing that the definition of environmental goods and services’ under the WTO negotiations needs to be expanded to better incorporate climate change

Botswana as a Role Model for Country Success

I argue that the economic success of Botswana can be explained by the historical development of its institutions which is related to the trajectory of the Tswana states over the past 200 years. These institutions created a much more stable and accountable government than elsewhere in Africa after independence with the desire and incentive to adopt good economic policies. There are two main lessons from this experience. The first is how successful an African economy can become using simple orthodox well-understood policies. The second is that successful development in Africa will be helped by a focus on the development of state institutions. Though Botswana inherited different institutions from elsewhere, it also built on these, in particular trying to create a national identity and to continually modernize and adapt institutions. There are many lessons for other African countries from these policy choices.governance, patrimonialism, state formation