The Role of Internet in the War against Terrorism – Threatening Privacy or an Ensuring Mechanism (National) Security – the Slovene Perspective

The use of information-communication technology (ICT) undoubtedly leads towards greater decentralization and individualization of societies. On the other hand, due to the use of ICT, the perception of physical reality has basically changed. When the ICT (security) implications of individual (human) or national security theoretical and empirical perspectives are discussed, a very interesting turning point can be observed. After 11 September 2001, and following the terrorist attacks in Europe, the state has been trying to increase control over ICT and especially the Internet. At the same time, civil society, non-governmental organizations and even individuals have been expressing their own security and other interests, expressed in the fight for privacy and individual human rights. Although the state reactions against particular security challenges are often disproportionate, we can see very different policies, even within the same security communities such as NATO and the European Union. Meanwhile, some countries have developed very strong mechanisms for controlling ICT and data retention; in others individual privacy and human rights are still respected and untouchable. Nevertheless, the terrorist attacks showed very clearly that telecommunication data retention as well as other control mechanisms could not prevent all kinds of such attacks. They could only be used after security incidents occurred as a means for identifying perpetrators. How much liberty society is prepared to sacrifice in exchange for greater, but in no way absolute, security depends on societal, political and cultural standards

Image steganography applications for secure communication

To securely communicate information between parties or locations is not an easy task considering the possible attacks or unintentional changes that can occur during communication. Encryption is often used to protect secret information from unauthorised access. Encryption, however, is not inconspicuous and the observable exchange of encrypted information between two parties can provide a potential attacker with information on the sender and receiver(s). The presence of encrypted information can also entice a potential attacker to launch an attack on the secure communication. This dissertation investigates and discusses the use of image steganography, a technology for hiding information in other information, to facilitate secure communication. Secure communication is divided into three categories: self-communication, one-to-one communication and one-to-many communication, depending on the number of receivers. In this dissertation, applications that make use of image steganography are implemented for each of the secure communication categories. For self-communication, image steganography is used to hide one-time passwords (OTPs) in images that are stored on a mobile device. For one-to-one communication, a decryptor program that forms part of an encryption protocol is embedded in an image using image steganography and for one-to-many communication, a secret message is divided into pieces and different pieces are embedded in different images. The image steganography applications for each of the secure communication categories are discussed along with the advantages and disadvantages that the applications have over more conventional secure communication technologies. An additional image steganography application is proposed that determines whether information is modified during communication. CopyrightDissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Computer Scienceunrestricte

The hunt for the paper tiger: The social construction of cyberterrorism.

For two decades, there has been a high-profile debate on the issue of cyberterrorism. Politicians, law enforcement agents, the information security industry, other experts and the press have all made claims about the threats to and vulnerabilities in our society, who is responsible and what should be done. This is a UK study in the field of Information Systems based on interpretative philosophical assumptions. The framework for the study is provided by the concept of moral panic, propounded by Cohen (2002) and elaborated by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) and Critcher (2003). Moral panic is used widely in the reference discipline of Sociology as a tool for investigating the social construction of social problems in cases where there is heightened public concern and intense media interest, closely followed by changes in legislation and social control mechanisms. This study employs moral panic as an heuristic device to assist in the investigation of the social mechanisms at work in the social construction of cyberterrorism. The corpus of data for analysis comprised articles from the UK national press relevant to cyberterrorism. A grounded theory approach was used to analyse these articles in order to identify images, orientations, stereotypes and symbolisation and to examine representational trends over time. Reflexivity in such a task is of the utmost importance, and the analytic process leading to an explanation of the social processes at work was deliberately divorced from the moral panic framework in order to guarantee rigour in the findings. The findings set out an explanation of how the concept of cyberterrorism has been constructed over two decades and compares this explanation with a framework provided by a model of moral panic. These findings are then linked to wider issues about national security, civil liberties and state control of information and communication technologies