CYBER SECURITY, DATA PROTECTION, AND PRIVACY IN A CONTESTED GEO-POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

On November 25, 2022, Aaron Shull, Managing Director, and General Counsel for the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Canada) presented on Cyber Security, Data Protection, and Privacy in a Contested Geo-Political Environment. The presentation was followed by a question-and-answer period with questions from the audience and CASIS Vancouver executives. The key points discussed were privacy rights—their limitations, relationship with technology, and overall value— as well as data exploitation and the need for improving cyber security postures for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).   Received: 2022-12-27Revised: 2023-01-1

Reimaging a Canadian National Security Strategy

On November 26, 2021, Mr. Aaron Shull, Managing Director and General Counsel at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), presented on Reimaging a Canadian National Security Strategy at the 2021 CASIS West Coast Security Conference. The presentation was followed by a question and answer period with questions from the audience and CASIS Vancouver executives. The key points discussed included CIGI’s new project to address Canada’s national security strategy gap and what it will take to accomplish the goals that could derive from the recommendations provided

Legal Mechanisms for Governing the Transition of Key Domain Name Functions to the Global Multi-Stakeholder Community

This Chapter proposes an alternative approach to the IANA transition that migrates the existing core contractual requirements imposed by the US government to the existing IANA functions customers. It also advances modest internal accountability revisions that could be undertaken within ICANN’s existing structure. Specifically, it advocates that the Independent Review Tribunal charged with reviewing certain ICANN board of directors-related decisions be selected by a multi-stakeholder committee rather than being subject to approval by ICANN and expanding the grounds for review to cover all of the rubrics recommended by ICANN’s “Improving Institutional Confidence” process in 2008-2009, including fairness, fidelity to the power, cogency of decision making and addressing the public interest. This new tribunal could be drawn from a standing panel of internationally recognized relevant technical experts, as well as internationally recognized jurists. Members of ICANN’s various stakeholder groups and the public should be able to make comments on the proposed bench before final appointment

Next-Generation Technology and Electoral Democracy: Understanding the Changing Environment

Democracies around the world are facing growing threats to their electoral systems in the digital age. Foreign interference in the form of dis- and misinformation has already influenced the results of democratic elections and altered the course of history. This special report, the result of a research project conducted in partnership with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) Canada, examines these cyberthreats from a Canadian and German perspective. Both Canada and Germany share common goals centred around protecting human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and international peace and security. Using case studies from experts in fields such as computer science, law and public policy, the special report offers recommendations to guide policy makers and stakeholders on how to protect elections from next-generation technologies and the threats they pose to democracy

The baryonic Tully-Fisher relation and galactic outflows

Most of the baryons in the Universe are not in the form of stars and cold gas in galaxies. Galactic outflows driven by supernovae/stellar winds are the leading mechanism for explaining this fact. The scaling relation between galaxy mass and outer rotation velocity (also known as the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, BTF) has recently been used as evidence against this viewpoint. We use a LCDM based semi-analytic disk galaxy formation model to investigate these claims. In our model, galaxies with less efficient star formation and higher gas fractions are more efficient at ejecting gas from galaxies. This is due to the fact that galaxies with less efficient star formation and higher gas fractions tend to live in dark matter haloes with lower circular velocities, from which less energy is required to escape the potential well. In our model the intrinsic scatter in the BTF is 0.15 dex, and mostly reflects scatter in dark halo concentration. The observed scatter, equal to 0.24 dex, is dominated by measurement errors. The best estimate for the intrinsic scatter is that it is less than 0.15 dex, and thus our LCDM based model (which does not include all possible sources of scatter) is only just consistent with this. In our model, gas rich galaxies, at fixed virial velocity (V_vir), with lower stellar masses have lower baryonic masses. This is consistent with the expectation that galaxies with lower stellar masses have had less energy available to drive an outflow. However, when the outer rotation velocity (V_flat) is used the correlation has the opposite sign, with a slope in agreement with observations. This is due to scatter in the relation between V_flat and V_vir. In summary, contrary to some previous claims, we show that basic features of the BTF are consistent with a LCDM based model in which the low efficiency of galaxy formation is determined by galactic outflows.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted to MNRA

GAMA/G10-COSMOS/3D-HST: The 0<z<5 cosmic star-formation history, stellar- and dust-mass densities

We use the energy-balance code MAGPHYS to determine stellar and dust masses, and dust corrected star-formation rates for over 200,000 GAMA galaxies, 170,000 G10-COSMOS galaxies and 200,000 3D-HST galaxies. Our values agree well with previously reported measurements and constitute a representative and homogeneous dataset spanning a broad range in stellar mass (10^8---10^12 Msol), dust mass (10^6---10^9 Msol), and star-formation rates (0.01---100 Msol per yr), and over a broad redshift range (0.0 < z < 5.0). We combine these data to measure the cosmic star-formation history (CSFH), the stellar-mass density (SMD), and the dust-mass density (DMD) over a 12 Gyr timeline. The data mostly agree with previous estimates, where they exist, and provide a quasi-homogeneous dataset using consistent mass and star-formation estimators with consistent underlying assumptions over the full time range. As a consequence our formal errors are significantly reduced when compared to the historic literature. Integrating our cosmic star-formation history we precisely reproduce the stellar-mass density with an ISM replenishment factor of 0.50 +/- 0.07, consistent with our choice of Chabrier IMF plus some modest amount of stripped stellar mass. Exploring the cosmic dust density evolution, we find a gradual increase in dust density with lookback time. We build a simple phenomenological model from the CSFH to account for the dust mass evolution, and infer two key conclusions: (1) For every unit of stellar mass which is formed 0.0065---0.004 units of dust mass is also formed; (2) Over the history of the Universe approximately 90 to 95 per cent of all dust formed has been destroyed and/or ejected

Legal Mechanisms for Governing the Transition of Key Domain Name Functions to the Global Multi-Stakeholder Community

This Chapter proposes an alternative approach to the IANA transition that migrates the existing core contractual requirements imposed by the US government to the existing IANA functions customers. It also advances modest internal accountability revisions that could be undertaken within ICANN’s existing structure. Specifically, it advocates that the Independent Review Tribunal charged with reviewing certain ICANN board of directors-related decisions be selected by a multi-stakeholder committee rather than being subject to approval by ICANN and expanding the grounds for review to cover all of the rubrics recommended by ICANN’s “Improving Institutional Confidence” process in 2008-2009, including fairness, fidelity to the power, cogency of decision making and addressing the public interest. This new tribunal could be drawn from a standing panel of internationally recognized relevant technical experts, as well as internationally recognized jurists. Members of ICANN’s various stakeholder groups and the public should be able to make comments on the proposed bench before final appointment