Foreword: The Political Geography of Race Data in the Criminal Justice System

Several months ago, there was a heated discussion on CrimProf, the listserv for criminal law professors, about the disproportionate representation of minorities in the criminal justice system. Few participants in this online discussion contested the reality that racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, make up a far larger percentage of those arrested and incarcerated than should be expected from their percentage of the country\u27s total population

Gaming security by obscurity

Shannon sought security against the attacker with unlimited computational powers: *if an information source conveys some information, then Shannon's attacker will surely extract that information*. Diffie and Hellman refined Shannon's attacker model by taking into account the fact that the real attackers are computationally limited. This idea became one of the greatest new paradigms in computer science, and led to modern cryptography. Shannon also sought security against the attacker with unlimited logical and observational powers, expressed through the maxim that "the enemy knows the system". This view is still endorsed in cryptography. The popular formulation, going back to Kerckhoffs, is that "there is no security by obscurity", meaning that the algorithms cannot be kept obscured from the attacker, and that security should only rely upon the secret keys. In fact, modern cryptography goes even further than Shannon or Kerckhoffs in tacitly assuming that *if there is an algorithm that can break the system, then the attacker will surely find that algorithm*. The attacker is not viewed as an omnipotent computer any more, but he is still construed as an omnipotent programmer. So the Diffie-Hellman step from unlimited to limited computational powers has not been extended into a step from unlimited to limited logical or programming powers. Is the assumption that all feasible algorithms will eventually be discovered and implemented really different from the assumption that everything that is computable will eventually be computed? The present paper explores some ways to refine the current models of the attacker, and of the defender, by taking into account their limited logical and programming powers. If the adaptive attacker actively queries the system to seek out its vulnerabilities, can the system gain some security by actively learning attacker's methods, and adapting to them?Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables; final version appeared in the Proceedings of New Security Paradigms Workshop 2011 (ACM 2011); typos correcte

Standing While Black: Distinguishing Lyons in Racial Profiling Cases

Plaintiffs challenging racial profiling must contend with the Supreme Court\u27s decision in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, which restricted standing for injunctive relief against government officials. This Note articulates a framework for assessing standing for injunctive relief based on case law following Lyons: Plaintiff must demonstrate a sufficiently credible threat of future harm where government conduct was authorized by a policy, practice, or custom and where plaintiff was law-abiding. Lyons analysis focuses exclusively on an individual\u27s likelihood of future harm because the Court was reluctant to let the grievance of one individual support city-wide injunctive relief. Where racial profiling cases raise equal protection claims alleging that groups of individuals are targeted by police, the concerns supporting the Lyons requirement become less relevant. Although the Court has never explicitly distinguished Lyons, in the Court\u27s equal protection decisions, standing is presumed where a group is harmed. Following these decisions, Lyons should be distinguished in racial profiling cases

Arrests as Regulation

For some arrested individuals, the most important consequences of their arrest arise outside the criminal justice system. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in conviction—can lead to a range of consequences, including deportation, eviction, license suspension, custody disruption, or adverse employment actions. But even as courts, scholars, and others have drawn needed attention to the civil consequences of criminal convictions, they have paid relatively little attention to the consequences of arrests in their own right. This article aims to fill that gap by providing an account of how arrests are systemically used outside the criminal justice system. Noncriminal justice actors who rely on arrests—such as immigration enforcement officials, public housing authorities, employers and licensing authorities, child protective service providers, among others—routinely receive and use arrest information for their own objectives. They do so not because arrests are the best regulatory tools, but because they regard arrests as proxies for information they value, and because arrests are often easy and inexpensive to access. But when noncriminal justice actors rely on arrests, they set off a complicated and poorly understood web of interactions with the criminal justice system. Regulatory bodies and others that make decisions based on arrests can coordinate and pool resources with prosecutors and police officers, achieving a level of enforcement that neither could achieve alone, or they can make decisions that undermine important aspects of the criminal justice process. This article maps different regulatory interactions based on arrests, and illustrates the need for greater oversight over how arrests are used and disseminated outside the criminal justice system

A host of factors regulating influenza virus replication.

A new series of genetic screens begins to illuminate the interaction between influenza virus and the infected cell

Force-velocity profiling in club-based field hockey players : Analyzing the relationships between mechanical characteristics, sex, and positional demands

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