The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination

Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of security if we view it through the lens of fascism? Out of these questions it is suggested that the central issue might be less a question of “security and exclusion” and much more a question of “security and extermination.

Social Security Reform: Legal Analysis of Social Security Benefit Entitlement Issues

[Excerpt] Calculations indicating that in the long run the Social Security program will not be financially sustainable under the present statutory scheme have fueled the current debate regarding Social Security reform. This report addresses selected legal issues which may be raised regarding entitlement to Social Security benefits as Congress considers possible changes to the Social Security program, and in view of projected long-range shortfalls in the Social Security Trust Funds

A General Approach for Securely Querying and Updating XML Data

Over the past years several works have proposed access control models for XML data where only read-access rights over non-recursive DTDs are considered. A few amount of works have studied the access rights for updates. In this paper, we present a general model for specifying access control on XML data in the presence of update operations of W3C XQuery Update Facility. Our approach for enforcing such updates specifications is based on the notion of query rewriting where each update operation defined over arbitrary DTD (recursive or not) is rewritten to a safe one in order to be evaluated only over XML data which can be updated by the user. We investigate in the second part of this report the secure of XML updating in the presence of read-access rights specified by a security views. For an XML document, a security view represents for each class of users all and only the parts of the document these users are able to see. We show that an update operation defined over a security view can cause disclosure of sensitive data hidden by this view if it is not thoroughly rewritten with respect to both read and update access rights. Finally, we propose a security view based approach for securely updating XML in order to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of XML data.Comment: No. RR-7870 (2012

Human Security: Undermining Human Rights?

This article warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. Insofar as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, or new mechanisms for dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human rights regime. When it simply rephrases human rights principles without identifying new threats, victims, duty-bearers, or mechanisms, however, at best it complements human rights and at worst it undermines them. A narrow view of human security is a valuable addition to the international normative regime requiring wstate and international action against severe threats to human beings. By contrast, an overly broad view of human security ignores the human rights regime; by subsuming human rights under human security, it also undermines the primacy of civil and political rights as a strategic tool for citizens to fight for their rights against their own states

National Security Lawyering: The Best View of the Law as a Regulative Ideal

In The National Security Lawyer in Crisis: When the “Best View” of the Law May Not Be the Best View, Robert Bauer describes the challenges for executive branch lawyers providing advice during a national security crisis. Bauer focuses on two especially perilous episodes in United States history—the Cuban Missile Crisis and the run-up to U.S. involvement in World War II—and analyzes the legal advice Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt, respectively, received. In both cases, widely respected lawyers gave legal advice that supported the President’s preferred outcome, but almost certainly did not represent what the lawyers considered the best view of the law. The “best view” model of lawyering appears to have no formal or widely recognized definition, either in Bauer’s article or elsewhere in the literature. Perhaps the best articulation of the concept is in the memorandum that sets out the “best practices” for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which directs OLC lawyers to “provide advice based on [their] best understanding of what the law requires—not simply an advocate’s defense of the contemplated action or position proposed by an agency or the Administration.” In rendering this advice, they must seek “to provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that appraisal will constrain the Administration’s or an agency’s pursuit of desired practices or policy objectives.” Bauer takes a dim view of this best view model, which he considers rigid, disconnected from important policy context, and unworkable in a crisis. Bauer proposes an exception to the best view approach for lawyers facing a national security crisis. Lawyers under those circumstances, he argues, should be free to provide alternative legal analysis that supports the preferred policy position, so long as it is credible and made in good faith. Bauer’s proposal to create an exception to the best view standard for crises, however, risks compromising the quality of national security lawyering overall. National security lawyers in the Executive Branch practice in an environment without many of the formal and informal incentives for high-quality legal advice that are common in other fields. The stakes are unusually high, which increases pressure from policymakers. At the same time, there is less external oversight from the courts and Congress, and the secrecy of much of the subject matter makes peer and public input difficult. Because of these challenges, it is important to build into the process of developing national security legal advice as many protections for high-quality legal analysis as possible. The best view standard is such a protection, and a critical one. The best view standard is important to high-quality national security lawyering not because it always results in an objectively “right” legal answer—that is not possible. Instead, the best view standard acts as a guidepost—a regulative ideal— for lawyers, reminding them of their distinctive role in the process and grounding them with an external professional standard. It serves as a counterweight to the inevitable pressures that these lawyers face. It also honors and upholds the unique responsibilities of Executive Branch lawyers to assist the President in carrying out his constitutional responsibility to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Bauer’s proposal to recognize a lower standard in crisis situations would subvert this protection

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

Complexity and Unwinding for Intransitive Noninterference

The paper considers several definitions of information flow security for intransitive policies from the point of view of the complexity of verifying whether a finite-state system is secure. The results are as follows. Checking (i) P-security (Goguen and Meseguer), (ii) IP-security (Haigh and Young), and (iii) TA-security (van der Meyden) are all in PTIME, while checking TO-security (van der Meyden) is undecidable, as is checking ITO-security (van der Meyden). The most important ingredients in the proofs of the PTIME upper bounds are new characterizations of the respective security notions, which also lead to new unwinding proof techniques that are shown to be sound and complete for these notions of security, and enable the algorithms to return simple counter-examples demonstrating insecurity. Our results for IP-security improve a previous doubly exponential bound of Hadj-Alouane et al