Envisioning technology through discourse: a case study of biometrics in the National Identity Scheme in the United Kingdom

Around the globe, governments are pursuing policies that depend on information technology (IT). The United Kingdom’s National Identity Scheme was a government proposal for a national identity system, based on biometrics. These proposals for biometrics provide us with an opportunity to explore the diverse and shifting discourses that accompany the attempted diffusion of a controversial IT innovation. This thesis offers a longitudinal case study of these visionary discourses. I begin with a critical review of the literature on biometrics, drawing attention to the lack of in-depth studies that explore the discursive and organizational dynamics accompanying their implementation on a national scale. I then devise a theoretical framework to study these speculative and future-directed discourses based on concepts and ideas from organizing visions theory, the sociology of expectations, and critical approaches to studying the public’s understanding of technology. A methodological discussion ensues in which I explain my research approach and methods for data collection and analysis, including techniques for critical discourse analysis. After briefly introducing the case study, I proceed to the two-part analysis. First is an analysis of government actors’ discourses on biometrics, revolving around formal policy communications; second is an analysis of media discourses and parliamentary debates around certain critical moments for biometrics in the Scheme. The analysis reveals how the uncertain concept of biometrics provided a strategic rhetorical device whereby government spokespeople were able to offer a flexible yet incomplete vision for the technology. I contend that, despite being distinctive and offering some practical value to the proposals for national identity cards, the government’s discourses on biometrics remained insufficiently intelligible, uninformative, and implausible. The concluding discussion explains the unraveling visions for biometrics in the case, offers a theoretical contribution based on the case analysis, and provides insights about discourses on the ‘publics’ of new technology such as biometrics

Categorizing Blog Spam

The internet has matured into the focal point of our era. Its ecosystem is vast, complex, and in many regards unaccounted for. One of the most prevalent aspects of the internet is spam. Similar to the rest of the internet, spam has evolved from simply meaning ‘unwanted emails’ to a blanket term that encompasses any unsolicited or illegitimate content that appears in the wide range of media that exists on the internet. Many forms of spam permeate the internet, and spam architects continue to develop tools and methods to avoid detection. On the other side, cyber security engineers continue to develop more sophisticated detection tools to curb the harmful effects that come with spam. This virtual arms race has no end in sight. Most efforts thus far have been toward accurately detecting spam from ham, and rightfully so since initial detection is essential. However, research is lacking in understanding the current ecosystem of spam, spam campaigns, and the behavior of the botnets that drive the majority of spam traffic. This thesis focuses on characterizing spam, particularly the spam that appears in forums, where the spam is delivered by bots posing as legitimate users. Forum spam is used primarily to push advertisements or to boost other websites’ perceived popularity by including HTTP links in the content of the post. We conduct an experiment to collect a sample of the blog posts and network activity of the spambots that exist in the internet. We then present a corpora available to conduct analysis on and proceed with our own analysis. We cluster associated groups of users and IP addresses into entities, which we accept as a model of the underlying botnets that interact with our honeypots. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to determine that creating semantic-based models of botnets are sufficient for distinguishing them from one another. We also find that the syntactic structure of posts has little variation from botnet to botnet. Finally we confirm that to a large degree botnet behavior and content hold across different domains

A System Out of Balance: A Critical Analysis of Philosophical Justifications for Copyright Law through the Lenz of Users’ Rights

Ultimately, this paper has three goals. The first is to offer an analysis of users’ rights under copyright law from four commonly used theoretical perspectives. These are labor, personality, economic and utilitarian theories. In doing so, it will demonstrate that the philosophies that underpin modern copyright law support a broad and liberal set of rights for derivative creativity. It will argue that current treatment of derivative works is unnecessarily conservative from a theoretical perspective. Second, this paper will demonstrate how, in spite of theory that supports a healthy community of derivative creativity, those who practice it have been further disenfranchised by the law. It will argue term limit extensions, increased protectionist treatment of secondary works online, and the functional lack of access to proper licensing mechanisms have rendered users’ rights impotent. Finally, in conclusion, it will offer a solution to the apparent imbalance of power in the form of replacing property-based derivative rights with liability rules. The conclusion, in many ways, merits its own paper and is meant as merely a suggestion of direction rather than a formulated solution

2003-2007 Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans

Analyzes rates, patterns, and sources of anti-Arab-American hate crimes and discrimination, including detainee abuse, delays in naturalization, and threats; civil liberties concerns; bias in schools; and defamation in the media. Includes case summaries

Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialised films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition and that they adapt the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serialised visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces how film serials brought the broadcast model of radio and television to the big screen and thereby introduced models of serial storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise

BIO-SPATIAL POLICING IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: EXAMINING IMPACTS AND RESISTANCE THROUGH MOBILITIES AND CHILDREN\u27S EVERYDAY LIFE

Despite decades of reforms and technological innovations, increasing evidence shows that state securitization disproportionately harms already racially, spatially, and socio-economically marginalized communities. My research investigates uneven impacts of state securitization, from punitive welfare programs to school surveillance to policing. Across sites, I focus on scales, voices and the everyday lived experiences often left out of scholarly discourse and sensational media. In the current climate of growing awareness and scholarship on police violence, my dissertation addresses three less-studied areas: 1) the interplay between racial, gendered, spatial, and technified police practices; 2) how these practices impact the everyday lives of those racially and socioeconomically marginalized; and 3) how children adapt practically and imaginatively to such impacts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Cincinnati (with police and children), policy analysis, and textual analysis of media articles, I explore the practices, experiences and perceptions of what I call bio-spatial policing, as well as reworkings and refusals of securitizing regimes. This dissertation makes four main contributions. Chapter two introduces the analytic framework of bio-spatial policing through an examination of the policing of everyday mobilities in targeted New York City zones. These police hot-spots are sites of mobility constrained by racial, social, biometric, bio-political, and spatial police tactics. Because this technified policing is enacted spatially and governs residents\u27 mobility, I use the conceptual apparatus of bio-spatial profiling. I argue that its lived experience is one of pervasive fear governing mobilities. Based in the more generalizable mid-sized, Mid-West city, Cincinnati provides a counterpoint to New York’s exceptionalism for chapter three, which makes the second contribution. Building on chapter two, it examines the everyday life of bio-spatial policing, simultaneously researching police and children’s lived experiences. Its first contribution is in conceptualizing constellations of surveillance and policing following children through their daily lives, spaces, and imaginations. I argue that where policing and surveillance converge, specific fears arise. Constellations map out the ways these technologies and practices connect across space, time, and lived experience. Yet the chapter moves beyond this fear-based narrative, using constellations to map children’s networks of care as well. It examines their practiced and imagined reworkings and refusals to what I call regimes of securitization—both the constellations of policing and surveillance and the victim/criminal narratives attempting to define children. Chapter four surveys the subfield of police geographies which my work draws from and contributes to. I analyze the claim of the subfield’s marginality, arguing that there is a wealth of minor (not marginal) feminist, queer, and BIPOC police geographies. I highlight the ways scholars conceptualize policing’s spatiality, from spatial tactics, effects and impacts to spatialized resistance, noting the trend in recent works that envisions a world without police. Across the dissertation, I highlight ways technology and police converge in a practice of bio-spatial policing that is greater than the sum of its parts, Throughout, I examine bio-spatial policing’s impacts on everyday lives, in two very different U.S. cities and in police geographies literature. Yet in each chapter I also move beyond this important focus on fear and harm to explore reworkings, resistance, and refusal in literature and on the ground. I argue that both narratives are necessary, and the concept of constellations provides both a map of bio-spatial profiling’s harms, weaknesses, and the potential for another world resting in the space between its stars

How\u27s My Network - Incentives and Impediments of Home Network Measurements

Gathering meaningful information from Home Networking (HN) environments has presented researchers with measurement strategy challenges. A measurement platform is typically designed around the process of gathering data from a range of devices or usage statistics in a network that are specifically behind the HN firewall. HN studies require a fine balance between incentives and impediments to promote usage and minimize efforts for user participation with the focus on gathering robust datasets and results. In this dissertation we explore how to gather data from the HN Ecosystem (e.g. devices, apps, permissions, configurations) and feedback from HN users across a multitude of HN infrastructures, leveraging low impediment and low/high incentive methods to entice user participation. We look to understand the trade-offs of using a variety of approach types (e.g. Java Applet, Mobile app, survey) for data collections, user preferences, and how HN users react and make changes to the HN environment when presented with privacy/security concerns, norms of comparisons (e.g. comparisons to the local environment and to other HNs) and other HN results. We view that the HN Ecosystem is more than just “the network” as it also includes devices and apps within the HN. We have broken this dissertation down into the following three pillars of work to understand incentives and impediments of user participation and data collections. These pillars include: 1) preliminary work, as part of the How\u27s My Network (HMN) measurement platform, a deployed signed Java applet that provided a user-centered network measurement platform to minimize user impediments for data collection, 2) a HN user survey on preference, comfort, and usability of HNs to understand incentives, and 3) the creation and deployment of a multi-faceted How\u27s My Network Mobile app tool to gather and compare attributes and feedback with high incentives for user participation; as part of this flow we also include related approaches and background work. The HMN Java applet work demonstrated the viability of using a Web browser to obtain network performance data from HNs via a user-centric network measurement platform that minimizes impediments for user participation. The HMN HN survey work found that users prefer to leverage a Mobile app for HN data collections, and can be incentivized to participate in a HN study by providing attributes and characteristics of the HN Ecosystem. The HMN Mobile app was found to provide high incentives, with minimal impediments, for participation with focus on user Privacy and Security concerns. The HMN Mobile app work found that 84\% of users reported a change in perception of privacy and security, 32\% of users uninstalled apps, and 24\% revoked permissions in their HN. As a by-product of this work we found it was possible to gather sensitive information such as previously attached networks, installed apps and devices on the network. This information exposure to any installed app with minimal or no granted permissions is a potential privacy concern

The Normalization of Surveillance in Superhero Films

This study examines how surveillance and surveillance technology has evolved and become normalized in 21st century superhero films. It examines 51 live-action films released between 2000 and 2013. Superhero films have become immensely popular, with films planned for release well into the next decade. Understanding superheroes as filling the role of watchful guardians of civil society, how they are seen to be carrying out their roles takes on greater importance in an age where security concerns are clashing with privacy concerns. The theoretical backbone of the study is Michel Foucault’s panopticon and Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity. While the former presents surveillance as an oppressive exercise of power that results in subjects self-regulating their behaviour, the latter focuses on how the flow of information an individual generates, from both ascribed physical data and consumer-driven data, seduces the individual to behave in a manner commiserate with apolitical capitalist ideals. The major contribution coming from this study is a new theoretical concept, the dissolved panopticon. The concept contains three categories: Liquid Technology, Solid Technology, and Non Technology. It was developed to synthesize the panopticon and liquidity, placing technological and non technological surveillance techniques under a one umbrella concept that allows future research to examine surveillance as an interaction between a subject and the technique of surveillance, rather than as separate parts. The study was conducted using a manifest content analysis, which allowed for a clear picture of how surveillance has evolved. This research indicates that surveillance in superhero films has increased over the course of the study period, with much of the growth occurring within the categories of Liquid Technology and Solid Technology

Organisational dystopia : surrealist paintings for critical management studies

This thesis responds to a call to bring humanities into organisation studies. The researcher analyses and interprets contemporary Surrealist paintings for understanding organisational dystopia. While organisational dystopia is not new to the field of Critical Management Studies (CMS), it is a concept enriched by a variety of imaginative stances addressing marginalised or silenced experiences of work life. One such area of imagination is painting. Paintings have historically examined work as a subject of art, yet art has been missed in organisation studies. To address this issue, as well as contribute further to an understanding of organisational dystopia, this thesis presents a case for expanding the field of culture studies in CMS by looking into Surrealism and paintings. This thesis is one of the first of its kind to analyse and interpret paintings in the discipline of organisation studies. The researcher formulates an original framework for examining the contemporary Surrealist paintings by the artist Tetsuya Ishida, who represents the dark, gloomy dystopia of Japanese salarymen. The framework is a system to analyse form (material) and content (meaning), and to interpret paintings. Through this devised framework, paintings are analysed and interpreted in response to two research questions: What are qualities of organisational dystopia? and What are themes of organisational dystopia? The researcher elaborates on organisational dystopia in two ways. First, in the identification of qualities of organisational dystopia, including objectification of labour. Second, in the recognition of themes of organisational dystopia, such as a totalitarian control of private space and complexities of escaping or enduring a dystopia. By addressing organisational dystopia, the researcher presents a warning about the darkness of progress. This research contributes in the two main ways: adding to knowledge on organisational dystopia and arguing that paintings are a valuable method to research design. Thus, this thesis presents a way forward for organisation studies to investigate concepts and criticisms via imagination and art