Beliefs and attitudes of citizens in Italy towards smart surveillance and privacy

This document presents the Italian results of a qualitative study undertaken as part of the SMART project – “Scalable Measures for Automated Recognition Technologies” (SMART; G.A. 261727). The analysis and results are based on a set of three focus group discussions comprising of 21 participants, which were held in order to examine the beliefs and attitudes of citizens towards smart surveillance and privacy. The focus group discussions were conducted in line with a discussion guide mainly consisting of different scenarios aimed at stimulating a discussion amongst the participants. While some scenarios dealt with surveillance in everyday contexts likely to be encountered by research participants, other scenarios were hypothetical in nature and their aim was to elicit the feelings, beliefs and attitudes of the participants in relation to dataveillance, the massive integration of data from different sources and the “security versus privacy trade-off”.Scalable Measures for Automated Recognition Technologies (G.A. 267127). The project was co-financed by the European Union within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013).peer-reviewe

The Sustainability of Serbian Civil Society Organizations: Evidences and Remarks

This article try to analyze the question of sustainability of Serbian civil society organizations (CSOs) on the basis of a research carried out by CERFE about juridical and non-juridical obstacles for CSOs. As the study highlights, CSOs: still face difficulties in obtaining real recognition of certain fundamental human and juridical rights; still do not have full self-governance; have several problems in professional identity, as regards knowledge and operative capacities; have an inadequate image and poorly recognised public role; face serious problems of sustainability. These last problems deals with such aspects as whether CSOs have the possibility to conduct certain economic activities, their taxation treatment, their opportunity to access credit, the way to obtain government funding and funds from abroad, tax incentives for individuals and firms wishing to make donations to CSOs, and more besides. On the basis of the research results, at least 5 types of “social regimes” can be identified, concerning: the production of appropriate knowledge about CSOs situations; the capacity building of CSOs; the legislative reform concerning the economic and financial aspects of CSOs life; the public communication about CSOs; the awareness-raising of political society about the CSOs problems and opportunities

From Password to Pepperspray. Associations in the context of surveillance.:Surveillance Ambiguities & Assymetries.6th international Surveillance & Society conference

Whilst those institutions or individuals who implement technological surveillance measures often claim that these aim to increase either national security or citizens’ personal safety, it has become increasingly accepted that such security will, inevitably, generate forms of insecurity as by-products. Fuelled by economic and political instabilities on a global scale, risks and uncertainty have supposedly become part of our everyday lives. But do we really live in such multi-leveled cultures of fear? Within SMART, a collaborative project co-funded by the European Union, research was conducted to explore citizens’ attitudes towards surveillance and privacy. As part of this study focus group discussions with a total of 320 participants in 14 European countries were carried out. At the beginning of each discussion, before the topic of surveillance was introduced, participants were asked to freely associate with terms such as privacy, national security, and personal safety. This unstructured and indirect soliciting of response encouraged respondents to project their underlying motivations, feelings or beliefs. Combining the word association study with content analysis and following a multidisciplinary approach, the qualitative results reveal a more nuanced picture relating to concepts of surveillance and protection. Neither privacy nor personal safety were predominantly associated with absence, loss or violation, but rather associations appeared to be influenced by local incidents, specifically related to dataveillance, or to perceptions and constructions of privacy itself. Associations with national security were, partially, linked to local political histories, but self-responsibility and self-defence appeared to play the more important role. These findings suggest that citizens’ attitudes to surveillance and personal safety may differ from those found in other studies based on direct questions. They shift the focus to more complex conceptualisations of protection where asymmetry may be both defective and productive

Sul presunto linguaggio criptico nell’elaborazione politico-istituzionale di Aldo Moro

La tesi di questo intervento intende dimostrare che, contrariamente al luogo comune, il linguaggio politico di A. Moro non è criptico e involuto, ma è un linguaggio idoneo a descrivere una realtà complessa e per larghi tratti paradossale come la realtà sociopolitica italiana. Se si considera la celebre immagine delle «convergenze parallele» si può agevolmente dimostrare che essa ben lungi dall’essere, come Moro stesso affermò in un primo momento, un «assurdo geometrico e logico», è invece l’idea migliore per focalizzare l’attenzione e sollecitare l’approfondimento su uno dei tratti più tipici della complessità italiana

Responsible Biosciences — A Manifesto for the Transformation of Science-Society Relations

Responsibility is a concept increasingly used to refer to the ethical aspect of doing research and innovation. In this Manifesto, responsibility is elaborated as a concept broader in scope and impact, i.e., as a concept to guide institutional practices for better managing current transformations in science and science-society relationships. These transformations are, at the same time, promising and risky. Responsibility, as presented in this Manifesto, allows for better balancing between sustainability and profitability, between goal-focused and curiosity-driven research, and between open science and market-driven science. Academic research and industrial research are now intimately intertwined, and one depends on the other now. Thus, responsibility does not only concern research institutions or universities but also involves a myriad of actors turning around research and innovation, including private companies. Though this Manifesto is relevant for all scientific and scholarly research, it primarily draws on experiences in the biosciences. This Manifesto is one of the end products of the ResBios project, which was aimed at further developing and embedding practices of responsible research and innovation (RRI) in bioscience organisations