Uncontrollable Privacy - The right that every attacker desires

The request of the Internet users enjoying privacy during their e-activities enforces the Internet society to develop techniques which offer privacy to the Internet users, known as Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Among the Internet users, there are attackers who desire more than anything else to enjoy privacy during their malicious actions, and a PET is what they were looking for. Thus, although a PET should offer privacy to the internet users, proper techniques should also be employed in order to help the victims during the investigation procedure and unveil the identification of the attackers. The paper summarizes the current design issues of PETs and introduces additional issues in order to offer forensic investigation services. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt which it proves (the obvious) that the existing PETs do not meet accountability requirements. By knowing explicitly the reasons the PETs are inefficient offering accountability, it is the most appropriate way to make PETs offering higher level of accountability without decreasing the level of the privacy offered

Network Forensics and Privacy Enhancing Technologies “living” together in harmony

Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) is the technology responsible to hide the identification of Internet users, whereas network forensics is a technology responsible to reveal the identification of Internet users who perform illegal actions through the Internet. The paper identifies the collision of these opposite-goal technologies and describes what happens in case they come across. Can a Network Forensics protocol discover the identification of an Internet user who is trying to be anonymous behind a PET? The paper also proposes a way to bridge and eliminate the gap between these two technologies

The Civil Society as an Innovation Partner in Public Policy Making: Co-Creating the Greek National Action Plan on Open Government

Formulating governmental policies for the wider public cannot be an internal process. Embedding openness and participation principles in the policy formulation process can lead to initiatives that re-spond to the real needs and address the real challenges in a policy domain. This paper presents an overview of participation approaches in policy formulation and analyses the structured co-creation process applied by the Greek government to develop the National Action Plan on Open Government. The analysis of the bottom-up participatory approach reveals new insights into the new role of government ‘as a platform’ towards the development and evolution of Government 3.0. The new communication channels, innovative collaboration procedures and digital tools that enabled the active participation of the relevant actors in the policy formulation process suggest a co-creation approach which can be of wide applicability to other policy domains. The paper also addresses the important but under-estimated challenge of actively involving the relevant actors in the implementation of a co-created public policy. The analysis suggests an approach according to which civil society organizations are effectively engaged in the full life cycle of a public policy and take an active role within its implementation

A GENERALISED CO-EVALUATION MODEL OF PUBLIC POLICIES

Formulating government policies involves a wide network of stakeholders and policymakers and numerous techniques and strategies. Moving from policy formulation to policy evaluation, a key challenge is to enable the effective involvement of this network in the evaluation activities that aim to ex- amine the implementation and impact of a public policy. This paper studies the process of evaluating the quality of policy formulation and the effectiveness of its implementation introduced by the Open Government Partnership, a global open government initiative, and illustrates related aspects and challenges. Building on this study, the paper proposes a generalised open and inclusive evaluation model that may be applied for assessing the effectiveness of public policy development and implementation. Although based on the domain of open government, the proposed co-evaluation model may be of wide applicability to other public policy domains thus supporting the new role of government ‘as a platform’

Supporting the Design of Privacy-Aware Business Processes via Privacy Process Patterns

Privacy is an increasingly important concern for modern software systems which handle personal and sensitive user information. Privacy by design has been established in order to highlight the path to be followed during a system’s design phase ensuring the appropriate level of privacy for the information it handles. Nonetheless, transitioning between privacy concerns identified early during the system’s design phase, and privacy implementing technologies to satisfy such concerns at the later development stages, remains a challenge. In order to overcome this issue, mainly caused by the lack of privacy-related expertise of software systems engineers, this work proposes a series of privacy process patterns. The proposed patterns encapsulate expert knowledge and provide predefined solutions for the satisfaction of different types of privacy concerns. The patterns presented in this work are used as a component of an existing privacy-aware system design methodology, through which they are applied to a real life system

A framework to support selection of cloud providers based on security and privacy requirements

Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm that is radically changing the way humans store, share and access their digital files. Despite the many benefits, such as the introduction of a rapid elastic resource pool, and on-demand service, the paradigm also creates challenges for both users and providers. In particular, there are issues related to security and privacy, such as unauthorised access, loss of privacy, data replication and regulatory violation that require adequate attention. Nevertheless, and despite the recent research interest in developing software engineering techniques to support systems based on the cloud, the literature fails to provide a systematic and structured approach that enables software engineers to identify security and privacy requirements and select a suitable cloud service provider based on such requirements. This paper presents a novel framework that fills this gap. Our framework incorporates a modelling language and it provides a structured process that supports elicitation of security and privacy requirements and the selection of a cloud provider based on the satisfiability of the service provider to the relevant security and privacy requirements. To illustrate our work, we present results from a real case study

Europe in the shadow of financial crisis: Policy Making via Stance Classification

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) is phasing a multi–year financial crisis affecting the stability of its involved countries. Our goal is to gain useful insights on the societal impact of such a strong political issue through the exploitation of topic modeling and stance classification techniques. \ \ To perform this, we unravel public’s stance towards this event and empower citizens’ participation in the decision making process, taking policy’s life cycle as a baseline. The paper introduces and evaluates a bilingual stance classification architecture, enabling a deeper understanding of how citizens’ sentiment polarity changes based on the critical political decisions taken among European countries. \ \ Through three novel empirical studies, we aim to explore and answer whether stance classification can be used to: i) determine citizens’ sentiment polarity for a series of political events by observing the diversity of opinion among European citizens, ii) predict political decisions outcome made by citizens such as a referendum call, ii) examine whether citizens’ sentiments agree with governmental decisions during each stage of a policy life cycle.

Social Media Use for Decision Making Process in Educational Settings: The Greek Case for Leadership’s Views and Attitude in Secondary and Tertiary Education

The emergence of social media and their wide usage have brought changes in almost all fields of public sphere. Nowadays governmental organizations, agencies and politicians use social media in order to ensure major civil participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, emphasizing thus in participatory processes through which opinions are co-shaped and decisions are jointly made. On the other hand, in another field of public sphere, that of education, social media are mostly used for teaching support, promotion and publicity. Taking into account education’s key role in the cultivation of active citizenship as well as the fact that educational structures are self-governed, the aim of this study was to identify leadership’s views of Greek Secondary and Tertiary Education on the potential use of social media in educational environments for the purpose of a participatory decision-making process which broadens stakeholder involvement in educational policy-making