legal and regulatory issues

Cybersecurity is the newest and most unique national security issue of the twenty-first century. Cyber warfare uses computer technologies as defensive and offensive weapons in international relations. Until now, there has been no national debate within the United States over the concept of cyber warfare; neither its meaning nor the international laws that govern this concept have been discussed at any length, and nor have the domestic rules regarding it.

This article seeks to explain the harms of government surveillance. Drawing on law, history, literature, and the work of scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of “surveillance studies,” the article offers an account of what those harms are and why they matter. The article moves beyond the vagueness of current theories of surveillance to articulate a more coherent understanding and a more workable approach. At the level of theory, the paper explains why and when surveillance is particularly dangerous and when it is not.

This article focuses on the lack of information and on the policy changes necessary to create market pressure for companies to put their customers’ privacy first. The article outlines the numerous ways in which companies currently assist the government, often going out of their way to provide easy access to their customers’ private communications and documents.

This paper identifies the most common security objectives being set in ICT enabled solutions for judicial environments; as found in several on-going and finished projects co-funded by the European Union (EU). These objectives are discussed within the context of Justice and the state-of-the-art of Information Security is resented as possible solutions. Finally, a number of security initiatives and organizations which try to standardise solutions and approaches to common challenges are discussed.

The retention and protection of social media data has attracted renewed attention from policy-makers in the UK and across the EU. Having studied the complexity of how social media data operate in contexts of crisis, Ella McPherson provided evidence to a select committee on what lessons can be learned on the ethical and methodological complications of social media analysis. The summary point in this blog post form a cautionary tale about the range of issues related to the government analysing social media information.

The Act provides: functions, responsibilities and powers of the Ministry of Information and Communications; the establishment of the Bhutan Infocomm and Media Authority; provision of ICT facilities and ICt services; provisions relating to radiocommunications; provisions relating to media issues; provisions relating to cyber issues such as e-governance, e-commerce, consumer protection and online privacy; and offences, penalities and legal proceedings.

The Act is available in English and Dzongkha