Community Self Help

This paper advocates controlling crime through a greater emphasis on precautions taken not by individuals, but by communities. The dominant battles in the literature today posit two central competing models of crime control. In one, the standard policing model, the government is responsible for the variety of acts that are necessary to deter and prosecute criminal acts. In the other, private self-help, public law enforcement is largely supplanted by providing incentives to individuals to self-protect against crime. There are any number of nuances and complications in each of these competing stories, but the literature buys into this binary matrix

Migration control for mobile agents based on passport and visa

Research on mobile agents has attracted much attention as this paradigm has demonstrated great potential for the next-generation e-commerce. Proper solutions to security-related problems become key factors in the successful deployment of mobile agents in e-commerce systems. We propose the use of passport and visa (P/V) for securing mobile agent migration across communities based on the SAFER e-commerce framework. P/V not only serves as up-to-date digital credentials for agent-host authentication, but also provides effective security mechanisms for online communities to control mobile agent migration. Protection for mobile agents, network hosts, and online communities is enhanced using P/V. We discuss the design issues in details and evaluate the implementation of the proposed system

Cyber-Democracy or Cyber-Hegemony? Exploring the Political and Economic Structures of the Internet as an Alternative Source of Information

Although government regulation of the Internet has been decried as undercutting free speech, the control of Internet content through capitalist gateways???namely, profit-driven software companies???has gone largely uncriticized. The author argues that this discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force neglecting to confront the invasion of online advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. This study suggests that ???inappropriate content??? (that is, nudity, pornography, obscenities) constitutes a cultural currency through which concerns and responses to the Internet have been articulated within the mainstream. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, the author contends that the rhetorical elements creating ???cyber-safety??? concerns within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by asking them to see some Internet content as value laden (sexuality, trigger words, or adult content), while disguising the interests and authority of profitable computer software and hardware industries (advertising and marketing). Although most online ???safety measures??? neglect to confront the emerging invasion of advertising/marketing directed at children and youth, the author argues that media literacy in cyberspace demands such scrutiny. Unlike measures to block or filter online information, students need an empowerment approach that will enable them to analyze, evaluate, and judge the information they receive.published or submitted for publicatio

The collective securitization of cyberspace in the European Union

Reflecting a central premise of the collective securitisation model, it is argued in this article that both specific events and longer-term trends have galvanised and reinforced the EU discourse of increasing threat and risk around cybersecurity, at different points in time. Thus, whilst major cyberattacks have caused the EU to reflect with some urgency on the increasing threat and review its approach, new policy initiatives evolved incrementally thereafter, rather than being the product of any emergency action outside the EU’s normal politics. It is shown further that, in the case of cybersecurity, discourses of threat and risk have continued beyond policy initiation, and that this discourse has very much run in parallel with further action and initiatives. Finally, this article demonstrates how collective securitisation and legislation in certain key areas related to cybersecurity can also be subject to EU institutional desecuritisation moves, leading to national policy differentiation following a precipitating event

Is There an App for That? Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and a New Environment of Conflict Prevention and Resolution

Katsh discusses the new problems that are a consequence of a new technological environment in healthcare, one that has an array of elements that makes the emergence of disputes likely. Novel uses of technology have already addressed both the problem and its source in other contexts, such as e-commerce, where large numbers of transactions have generated large numbers of disputes. If technology-supported healthcare is to improve the field of medicine, a similar effort at dispute prevention and resolution will be necessary

A Portrait of the Internet as a Young Man

In brief, the core theory of Jonathan Zittrain’s1 2008 book The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It is this: good laws, norms, and code are needed to regulate the Internet, to prevent bad laws, norms, and code from compromising its creative capabilities and fettering its fecund flexibility. A far snarkier if less alliterative summary would be “We have to regulate the Internet to preserve its open, unregulated nature.” Zittrain posits that either a substantive series of unfortunate Internet events or one catastrophic one will motivate governments to try to regulate cyberspace in a way that promotes maximum stability, which will inhibit or possibly even preclude future technological innovations that rely on open access to the tools and systems that comprise the Internet. To head this off, he calls for a “transition to a networking infrastructure that is more secure yet roughly as dynamic as the current one,” which will be achieved by collaborative efforts, “a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence.” Zittrain uses brief, informal accounts of past events to build two main theories that dominate the book. First, he claims that open access, which he calls generativity, is under threat by a trend toward closure, which he refers to as tetheredness, which is counterproductively favored by proprietary entities. Though consumers prefer openness and the autonomy it confers, few take advantage of the opportunities it provides, and therefore undervalue it and too readily cede it in favor of the promise of security that tetheredness brings. Second, he argues that if the Internet is to find salvation it will be by the grace of “true netizens,” volunteers acting collectively in good faith to cultivate positive social norms online. Zittrain is a creative thinker and entertaining speaker, and his book is engaging and informative in much the same ways that his talks are, loaded with pop culture references and allegorical tales about technology and the once and future Internet. Zittrain uses numerous anecdotes to support his dual hypotheses, exhaustively affirming that open innovative tools and systems are essential for online life to flourish, and his contention that the Internet is exceedingly vulnerable to bad actors (a proposition I have never seen another cyberlaw scholar seriously question). But he isn’t very clear about the specific attributes of laws or regulations that could effectively foster enhanced security without impairing dynamism. He also seems to have a discomfitingly elitist view about who should be making policy decisions about the Internet’s future: like-minded, self-appointed, and knowledgeable volunteers with the time, interest, and expertise to successfully maneuver sectors of the Internet into the form or direction he thinks best

Cryptocurrency with a Conscience: Using Artificial Intelligence to Develop Money that Advances Human Ethical Values

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are offering new avenues for economic empowerment to individuals around the world. However, they also provide a powerful tool that facilitates criminal activities such as human trafficking and illegal weapons sales that cause great harm to individuals and communities. Cryptocurrency advocates have argued that the ethical dimensions of cryptocurrency are not qualitatively new, insofar as money has always been understood as a passive instrument that lacks ethical values and can be used for good or ill purposes. In this paper, we challenge such a presumption that money must be ‘value-neutral.’ Building on advances in artificial intelligence, cryptography, and machine ethics, we argue that it is possible to design artificially intelligent cryptocurrencies that are not ethically neutral but which autonomously regulate their own use in a way that reflects the ethical values of particular human beings – or even entire human societies. We propose a technological framework for such cryptocurrencies and then analyse the legal, ethical, and economic implications of their use. Finally, we suggest that the development of cryptocurrencies possessing ethical as well as monetary value can provide human beings with a new economic means of positively influencing the ethos and values of their societies

Virtual Inequality: Challenges for the Net\u27s Lost Founding Value

Freedom, liberty, and autonomy were the initial ideals heralded by cyberspace’s first generation of thinkers, writers and citizens, by those who helped forge the Internet and the early technological and intellectual foundations of “cyberspace.” These ideas were, says Lawrence Lessig, the “founding values of the Net” and inspired an entire generation of scholarship focused on preserving the free and libertarian nature of the Internet’s culture and architecture. But what has anyone to say about equality? Few, if any, scholars today focus on equality as a similar Internet “founding value” that ought to be preserved—if it indeed ever existed—or promote it as something to strive for online, or in virtual worlds and communities. This Article aims to change this. Returning to some of the foundational texts of cyberspace, this Article argues that equality ought to be understood as a “founding value of the Net” as much as liberty and freedom, and thus should be promoted and, where it exists, preserved. It then offers an in-depth account of the different forms of inequality in cyberspace, drawing, in particular, on challenges of online communities and virtual worlds and then considers measures to fight these inequities. It also argues that many challenges should be left to autonomous online communities to deal with themselves