Critical infrastructure: a social worlds study of values, design and resistance in Tor and the Tor community

While cybercrime research has become well-established within criminology, there is very little criminological research which treats the infrastructures and platforms of the Internet as subjects of criminological enquiry. These are increasingly taking on responsibility for the governance of large populations of users, and the engineers and developers of these platforms are increasingly having to navigate problems of crime, harm, and policing. This thesis explores, through qualitative empirical research, an Internet infrastructure which has particularly faced these issues: the Tor Project, an anonymity network which gives millions of users around the world extremely strong protections against online surveillance and censorship. This has been an important tool for whistleblowers, journalists, and activists, however it has also become associated with a range of criminal uses, especially the rise of ‘cryptomarkets’, marketplaces for illegal services and goods accessible through the Tor network which are very difficult for law enforcement to shut down. I explore how the Tor community attempt to navigate these issues and how they make sense of the role Tor plays in society, drawing on interviews with members of the Tor community, including designers and developers, the people who maintain Tor’s infrastructure, and others in the Tor community, as well as extensive archival research in Tor’s online mailing list archives. I use frameworks from Science and Technology Studies, in particular, social worlds theory, to explore the values of the Tor community, how they attempt to materialise them through infrastructure, and the challenges they face in practice. The Tor community, rather than sharing a strong set of shared values, is in fact a dense thicket of contradictory values and meanings. Using social worlds theory, I distil this into three internally-coherent social worlds, each of which makes sense of the work Tor does differently, rooted in differing practices, sensibilities and understandings of the political salience of privacy technology. These are: the engineer social world, which views privacy as a structure, understanding privacy technologies as reshaping the topologies of power in information systems; the activist social world, which views privacy as a struggle and privacy technologies as part of a political movement; and finally, the infrastructuralist social world, which views privacy as a service and privacy technologies as the neutral facilitators of their users’ action. I explore the relationships between these three social worlds, how they have come into contact and conflict with one another, and how they have changed over the years. These each shape Tor’s material form, its attempts to cultivate resilience against disruption by powerful actors, and how it navigates its implications in crime, harm, and power in different ways, each of which I explore in detail. Although Tor represents an attempt to act in the domain of infrastructural power, it has found that doing politics through design and engineering relies on a lot of hidden work and complex negotiation in practice, spilling out into the domains of politics, administration, and governance and becoming caught up in the very technologies of control which it tries to subvert. I end the thesis with a discussion, drawing from my empirical research, of Tor’s place in the wider landscape of geopolitics and online power and how it makes sense of this. I argue that the challenges Tor faces are reflective of deeper tensions between freedom and control at the heart of liberal societies and how they are governed

Influence government:Exploring practices, ethics, and power in the use of targeted advertising by the UK state

We have identified an emerging tool being used by the UK government across a range of public bodies in the service of public policy - the online targeted advertising infrastructure and the practices, consultancy firms, and forms of expertise which have grown up around it. This reflects an intensification and adaptation of a broader 'behavioural turn' in the governmentality of the UK state and the increasing sophistication of everyday government communications. Contemporary UK public policy is fusing with the powerful tools for behaviour change created by the platform economy. Operational data and associated systems of classification and profiling from public bodies are being hybridised with traditional consumer marketing profiles and then 'projected' onto the classification systems of the targeted advertising infrastructures. This is not simply a case of algorithms being used for sorting, surveilling, and scoring; rather this suggests that targeted interventions in the cultural and behavioural life of communities are now a core part of governmental power which is being algorithmically-driven, in combination with influencer networks, traditional forms of messaging, and frontline operational practices. We map these uses and practices of what we describe as the 'Surveillance Influence Infrastructure', identifying key ethical issues and implications which we believe have yet to be fully investigated or considered. What we find particularly striking is the coming-together of two separate structures of power - the governmental turn to behaviourism and prevention on one hand, and the infrastructures of targeting and influence (and their complex tertiary markets) on the other. We theorise this as a move beyond 'nudge' or 'behavioural science' approaches, towards a programme which we term 'influence government'

ISU Percussion Ensemble

Center for the Performing Arts April 15, 2018 Sunday Evening 7:00p.m

Influence policing: Strategic communications, digital nudges, and behaviour change marketing in Scottish and UK preventative policing

Influence policing is an emerging phenomenon: the use of digital targeted ‘nudge’ communications campaigns by police forces and law enforcement agencies to directly achieve strategic policing outcomes. While scholarship, civil society, and journalism have focused on political influence and targeting (often by malicious actors), there has been next to no research on the use of these influence techniques and technologies by governments for preventative law enforcement. With grant funding from SIPR and support from The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR), we have studied how this novel mode of police practice is developing through an in-depth study of Police Scotland’s strategic communications unit and a wider systematic overview of these campaigns across the UK

Influence government, platform power and the patchwork profile : exploring the appropriation of targeted advertising infrastructures for government behaviour change campaigns

The targeted digital advertising infrastructures on which the business models of the social media platform economy rest have been the subject of significant academic and political interest. In this paper, we explore and theorise the appropriation of these infrastructures — designed for commercial and political advertising — by the state. In the U.K., public sector bodies have begun to repurpose the surveillance and messaging capacities of these social media platforms, along with the influencer economy, to deliver targeted behaviour change campaigns to achieve public policy goals. We explore how frameworks of behavioural government have aligned with Internet platforms’ extensive infrastructures and the commercial ecologies of professionalised strategic marketing. We map the current extent of these practices in the U.K. through case studies and empirical research in Meta’s Ad Library dataset. Although the networks of power and discourse within the ad infrastructure are indeed acting to shape the capacities of the state to engage in online influence, public bodies are mobilising their own substantial material networks of power and data to re-appropriate them to their own ends. Partly as a result of attempts by Meta to restrict the targeting of protected characteristics, we observe state communications campaigns building up what we term patchwork profiles of minute behavioural, demographic, and location-based categories in order to construct and reach particular groups of subjects. However, rather than a clear vision of a ‘cybernetic society’ of reactive information control, we instead find a heterogeneous and piecemeal landscape of different modes of power

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community’s various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

A small-molecule PI3Kα activator for cardioprotection and neuroregeneration

Harnessing the potential beneficial effects of kinase signalling through the generation of direct kinase activators remains an underexplored area of drug development1,2,3,4,5. This also applies to the PI3K signalling pathway, which has been extensively targeted by inhibitors for conditions with PI3K overactivation, such as cancer and immune dysregulation. Here we report the discovery of UCL-TRO-1938 (referred to as 1938 hereon), a small-molecule activator of the PI3Kα isoform, a crucial effector of growth factor signalling. 1938 allosterically activates PI3Kα through a distinct mechanism by enhancing multiple steps of the PI3Kα catalytic cycle and causes both local and global conformational changes in the PI3Kα structure. This compound is selective for PI3Kα over other PI3K isoforms and multiple protein and lipid kinases. It transiently activates PI3K signalling in all rodent and human cells tested, resulting in cellular responses such as proliferation and neurite outgrowth. In rodent models, acute treatment with 1938 provides cardioprotection from ischaemia–reperfusion injury and, after local administration, enhances nerve regeneration following nerve crush. This study identifies a chemical tool to directly probe the PI3Kα signalling pathway and a new approach to modulate PI3K activity, widening the therapeutic potential of targeting these enzymes through short-term activation for tissue protection and regeneration. Our findings illustrate the potential of activating kinases for therapeutic benefit, a currently largely untapped area of drug development

Corrigendum to "Overview: oxidant and particle photochemical processes above a south-east Asian tropical rainforest (the OP3 project): introduction, rationale, location characteristics and tools" published in Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 169–199, 2010

Author(s): Hewitt, CN; Lee, JD; MacKenzie, AR; Barkley, MP; Carslaw, N; Carver, GD; Chappell, NA; Coe, H; Collier, C; Commane, R; Davies, F; Davison, B; DiCarlo, P; Di Marco, CF; Dorsey, JR; Edwards, PM; Evans, MJ; Fowler, D; Furneaux, KL; Gallagher, M; Guenther, A; Heard, DE; Helfter, C; Hopkins, J; Ingham, T; Irwin, M; Jones, C; Karunaharan, A; Langford, B; Lewis, AC; Lim, SF; MacDonald, SM; Mahajan, AS; Malpass, S; McFiggans, G; Mills, G; Misztal, P; Moller, S; Monks, PS; Nemitz, E; Nicolas-Perea, V; Oetjen, H; Oram, DE; Palmer, PI; Phillips, GJ; Pike, R; Plane, JMC; Pugh, T; Pyle, JA; Reeves, CE; Robinson, NH; Stewart, D; Stone, D; Whalley, LK; Yang,