The Experts below are selected from a list of 228 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Michael W. Lewis - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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A Dark Descent into Reality: Making the case for an objective definition of torture
Washington and Lee Law Review, 2010Co-Authors: Michael W. LewisAbstract:Table of ContentsI. Introduction 79II. Universal Condemnation, Practical Uncertainties 82III. Coercion in Intelligence Collection 86A. Intelligence Collection Myths 861. Ticking Time Bombs 862. "Torture Does Not Work" 88B. Actual Intelligence Collection 90IV. Prohibitions Against Torture 93A. The International Prohibition of Torture 93B. Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment (CID) 95C. Court Decisions 98D. Expansive Definitions of Torture 101E. Restrictive Definitions of Torture 103F. The Price of Indeterminacy 105V. Detention, Interrogation, and Terror 106A. Common Reactions to Terror Threats 106B. Specific Examples 1071. Germany 1072. United Kingdom 1123. Israel 114C. Implications of State Practice 118VI. Defining Torture 118A. Effective Rulemaking 118B. The Proposed Standard 119C. Implementation 1211. How the Proposal Addresses the Problem 1212. Practical Application and Bright Line Rules 122D. Additional Benefits 1251. Internal Checks on Behavior 1252. Bridging the "Expectation Gap" 126E. Common Objections 1291. Mental Stress 1292. A Race to the Bottom 1303. The Proposal Undermines Reciprocity 1314. What About Waterboarding? 133VII. Conclusion 135All the pleasure in life is in general ideas. But all the use of life is in specific solutions, which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Letter to Elmer Gertz, March 1, 1899(1)I. IntroductionThe definition of torture is broken. Yet in spite of tremendous interest in the subject since 9/11, little has been done to address this problem seriously. This is due, in part, to the preference for generalities that most scholars have, as Holmes noted over 1 00 years ago. …
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a dark descent into reality making the case for an objective definition of torture
Social Science Research Network, 2009Co-Authors: Michael W. LewisAbstract:The definition of torture is broken. The malleability of the term "severe pain or suffering" at the heart of the definition has created a situation in which the world agrees on the words but cannot agree on their meaning. The "I know it when I see it" nature of the discussion of torture makes it clear that the definition is largely left to the eye of the beholder. This is particularly problematic when international law's reliance on self-enforcement is considered. After discussing current misconceptions about Intelligence gathering and coercion that are common to all sides of the torture debate, this article describes the reality of Intelligence Collection. It then reviews the wide range of competing definitions of torture; those provided by international courts, those proposed by commentators and those implemented by governments around the world. Some proposed definitions are so broad that practically any form of interrogation would be illegal, others so narrow as to allow for a wide variety of shockingly brutal techniques. What becomes apparent, not surprisingly, is that people or governments under pressure from terrorist attacks view the definition of "severe pain and suffering" differently from those outside such a cauldron. Yet international law's reliance upon self-enforcement requires a good faith interpretation of malleable terms such as "severe pain and suffering" by those under such pressure. The inevitable result, as witnessed in the US after 9/11, in the UK at the height of IRA violence in the early 1970's, in Germany during the "German Autumn" battle against the Red Army Faction in 1977, and in Israel during its struggles against Palestinian violence, is that such a "good faith" interpretation is not readily forthcoming from those charged with the protection of their civilian population. The excesses that followed were generally later regretted, but such regrets do little to comfort the victims of these excesses. This article proposes a solution. To prevent the definition of "severe pain and suffering" from changing between September 10 and September 12 (or more accurately from not being considered at all on September 10 to being considered in a very dark light on September 12), it recommends tying the definition to pre-existing standards that are difficult to manipulate and internally self-policing.
Craig Forcese - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Bill C-59 and the Judicialization of Intelligence Collection
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018Co-Authors: Craig ForceseAbstract:Canada's Bill C-59 responds to quandaries common to democracies in the early part of the 21st century. Among these challenges: How broad a remit should Intelligence services have to build pools of data in which to fish for threats? And how best can a liberal democracy structure its oversight and review institutions to guard against improper conduct by security and Intelligence services in this new data-rich environment? This paper examines how C-59 proposes re-shaping the activities of both the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in fashions responding to these dilemmas. Specifically, it highlights C-59’s proposed changes to CSIS’s capacity to collect bulk data as part of its Intelligence mandates, and also the new oversight system proposed for CSE’s foreign Intelligence and cybersecurity regimes. The paper examines the objectives motivating both sets of changes, and suggests that in its architecture, C-59 tries to web together the challenges of Intelligence in a technologically-sophisticated, information-rich environment, with privacy protections derived from a simpler age but updated to meet new demands.
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putting the law to work for cse bill c 59 and reforming the foreign Intelligence Collection andcybersecurity process
Social Science Research Network, 2017Co-Authors: Craig ForceseAbstract:This brief rehearses the background to Canada's bill C-59 and the changes it proposes to the Communications Security Establishment's foreign Intelligence authorization system. Those changes are best described as an effort to square a circle; that is, to place CSE on a sounder statutory and constitutional legal footing, while at the same time not anchoring its activities to legal regimes likely to stale-date quickly or burden excessively CSE in performing its crucial functions. The brief concludes that the changes go a long way to resolving constitutional doubts, but underscores the need for a modest amendment to ensure this objective is met.
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One Warrant to Rule Them All: Reconsidering the Judicialisation of Extraterritorial Intelligence Collection
National Security Surveillance and Terror, 2016Co-Authors: Craig ForceseAbstract:Spies have always crossed borders. And in the close allied relationship between the so-called Five Eyes, Intelligence has also crossed borders. These practices are occasionally controversial. Intelligence sharing was at the heart of the Maher Arar inquiry, examining the conduct by Canadian police in providing (incorrect) Intelligence on Canadian Maher Arar that culminated in his maltreatment in Syria. Foreign electronic surveillance provoked sustained debate after the 2013 Snowden disclosures. More quietly, however, and sometimes clearly provoked by these public controversies, courts too have begun building legal pickets around these sorts of practices. In Canada, the result has been the ‘judicialisation’ of Intelligence Collection and sharing. This chapter examines recent developments in this area.
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Spies Without Borders: International Law and Intelligence Collection
2011Co-Authors: Craig ForceseAbstract:This article examines the status of peacetime spying in international law. Part I defines “spying” as the term is used in the article, focusing on Collection of Intelligence from human and electronic sources. The article then divides spying into geographic zones: territorial; extraterritorial; and transnational. In Part II, it examines doctrines of international law applicable to spying in each of these three geographic areas, focusing on sovereignty rules, international immunities and human rights principles. The article concludes that the question of international law and Intelligence-gathering is not easily reduced to a simple question of legality or not. Instead, an assessment of legality depends on a careful assessment of the location and technique of spying in question.
Asaf Lubin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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תקיפות מחשבים למטרות איסוף מודיעין כחלק מהמאבק בטרור בדין הישראלי המשווה והבין לאומי hacking for Intelligence Collection in the fight against terrorism israeli comparative and international perspectives
Social Science Research Network, 2020Co-Authors: Asaf LubinAbstract:תקציר בעברית: הניסיון של המחוקק הישראלי להביא להסדרה מפורשת של סמכויות השב״כ במרחב הקיברנטי משקף מגמה רחבה יותר הניכרת בעולם לעיגון בחקיקה ראשית של הוראות בדבר פעולות פצחנות מצד גופי ביון ומודיעין ורשויות אכיפת חוק למטרות איסוף מודיעין לשם סיכול עבירות חמורות, ובייחוד עבירות טרור אם בעבר היו פעולות מסוג אלה כפופות לנהלים פנימיים ומסווגים, הרי שהדרישה לשקיפות בעידן שלאחר גילויי אדוארד סנודן מחד והשימוש הנרחב בתקיפות מחשב לביצוע פעולות חיפוש וחקירה לסיכול טרור מאידך, מציפים כעת את הדרישה להסמכה מפורשת. במאמר זה אבקש למפות הן את השדה הטכנולוגי והן את השדה המשפטי בכל האמור בתקיפות מחשבים למטרות ריגול ומעקב. יש לשים לב כי המאמר עוסק בעיקר בהיבטי איסוף מידע, ובפעולות פצחנות למטרות אחרות – רק בעקיפין. במאמר זה אבקש לבחון אם התיקון התלוי ועומד לחוק השב"כ, המבקש להקל על השב"כ בביצוע תקיפות מחשב כחלק מהמאבק בטרור, עולה בקנה אחד עם מחויבויותיה הבין-לאומיות של ישראל, ובייחוד לכללים המנהגיים המקיפים את הזכות לפרטיות בדיני זכויות האדם הבין-לאומיים. המאמר נשען גם על בחינתה של חקיקה משווה אגב עיון בדין האמריקאי, האנגלי, הצרפתי והאיטלקי, כדי לעמוד על קנקנם של האיזונים והבלמים המגולמים בשיטות משפט אחרות, וכיצד הם מובחנים מהמנגנון המוצע בדין הישראלי. המאמר חותם בכמה וכמה עקרונות מנחים בהסדרה עתידית של התחום בהקישו מתזכיר חוק סדר הדין הפלילי (סמכויות אכיפה – המצאה, חיפוש, כניסה ותפיסה), התשע"א–2011. English Abstract: The Counter-Terrorism Bill, 5775-2015, introduced an array of criminal law and public law tools aimed at assisting the State of Israel in effectively fighting against terrorism. Simultaneously, the Bill sought to ensure a balance between the security interests, enumerated therein, and Israel’s commitments to “human rights and to customary international legal standards.” Of the various tools introduced in the Bill, Section 131 was one of the most controversial, as it called to amend the General Security Service Law, 5762-2002, and provide the Shabak with statutory authorization to engage in hacking of electronic devices for the purposes of preventing acts of terrorism and espionage directed against the State of Israel. The desire of the Israeli legislator to expressly regulate the authorities of the Shabak in cyberspace, reflects a growing trend amongst western democracies to establish, through primary legislation, effective frameworks that could control the use of hacking powers by Intelligence agencies and law enforcement. The paper examines existing and proposed Israeli hacking authorities and compares them to the situation in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy and France. Relying further on international human rights standards and on a review of technological capacities, the paper makes certain policy and legislative recommendations.
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"We Only Spy on Foreigners": The Myth of a Universal Right to Privacy and the Practice of Foreign Mass Surveillance
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017Co-Authors: Asaf LubinAbstract:The digital age brought with it a new epoch in global political life, one neatly coined by Professor Philip Howard as the “pax technica.” In this new world order, government and industry are “tightly bound” in technological and security arrangements that serve to push forward an information and cyber revolution of unparalleled magnitude. While the rise of information technologies tells a miraculous story of triumph over the physical constraints that once shackled mankind, these very technologies are also the cause of grave concern. Intelligence agencies have been recently involved in the exercise of global indiscriminate surveillance, which purports to go beyond their limited territorial jurisdiction and sweep in “the telephone, internet, and location records of whole populations.” Today’s political leaders and corporate elites are increasingly engaged in these kinds of programs of bulk interception, Collection, mining, analysis, dissemination, and exploitation of foreign communications data that are easily susceptible to gross abuse and impropriety. When called out about any of these programs, policy makers often respond to their constituencies with a shrug and a smile: we only apply these programs to foreigners, you have nothing to worry about. While the human rights community continues to adamantly uphold the myth of a universal right to privacy, in actuality the pax technica has already erected an alternative operational code, one in which “our” right to privacy and “theirs” are routinely differentiated. One higher set of standards and protections is provided for those within the territory of the state, and a lowered set is handed to those abroad. This distinction is a common feature in the wording of electronic communications surveillance regimes and the practice of signals Intelligence Collection agencies, and it is further legitimized by the steadfast support of the layman general public. Nonetheless, a liberal defense of this distinction is non-existent in the literature, as human rights scholars continue to oppose it arguing that it reflects in-group biases and violates the principle of non-discrimination. In this piece I try to make the liberal case for the distinction, justifying, in a limited sense, certain legal differentiations in treatment between domestic and foreign surveillance. These justifications, as I show in the piece, are grounded in practical limitations in the way foreign surveillance is conducted, both generally and in the digital age more specifically. I will further make a controversial claim: that in fighting this absolutist battle for universality, human rights defenders are losing the far bigger war over ensuring some privacy protections for foreigners in the global mass surveillance context. Accepting that certain distinctions are, in fact, legitimate, creates an opportunity to step outside the bounded thinking of one-size-fits-all human rights standards for all surveillance practices, and begin a much needed conversation on what a uniquely tailored human rights regime might look like in the foreign surveillance context. This piece, thus, makes a first attempt at sketching out such a tailored framework, with the hope of bridging the divide between privacy scholars and national security practitioners.
Ariel Felner - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Target oriented network Intelligence Collection: effective exploration of social networks
World Wide Web, 2019Co-Authors: Rami Puzis, Liron Kachko, Barak Hagbi, Roni Stern, Ariel FelnerAbstract:Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) is a crawling process whose goal is to find social network profiles that contain information about a given target. Such profiles are called leads and the TONIC problem is how to minimize crawling costs incurred while finding them. We model this problem as a search problem in an unknown graph and present a best-first search approach for solving it. Three key challenges are (1) which profiles to consider crawling to, (2) how to prioritize the crawling order, and (3) when additional crawling is not worthwhile. For the first challenge, we propose two frameworks: the Restricted TONIC Framework (RTF), that restricts the search to immediate neighbors of previously found leads, and the Extended TONIC Framework (ETF), that extends the scope of the search to a wider neighborhood. Guidelines for when to choose which framework are provided. For the second challenge, we propose a set of effective topology-based heuristics that guide the search towards profiles that are more likely to be leads. For the third challenge, we propose to use data collected in previously executed crawls to learn when additional crawling is expected to be useful.
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extended framework for target oriented network Intelligence Collection
Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 2014Co-Authors: Liron Samamakachko, Rami Puzis, Roni Stern, Ariel FelnerAbstract:The Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) problem is the problem of finding profiles in a social network that contain publicly available information about a given target profile via automated crawling. Such profiles are called leads. Leads can be found by crawling the network using the profiles' friend lists (immediate neighborhood) in order to decide which profile will be crawled next. Assuming that leads tend to cluster together, prior work limited the search for new leads only to immediate neighbors of the leads previously found. In this paper we relax this limitation, and extend the scope of the search to a wider neighborhood, including the possibility of crawling to non-leads, i.e., profiles that have no publicly available information about the target. We propose a set of heuristics that guide this search. Experimental results show that with the new setting more leads can be found and leads are found faster. In addition, we perform a cost benefit analysis of the search, weighing the reward of finding leads with the costs of the search.
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tonic target oriented network Intelligence Collection for the social web
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2013Co-Authors: Roni Stern, Liron Samama, Tal Beja, Zahy Bnaya, Rami Puzis, Ariel FelnerAbstract:In this paper we introduce the Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) problem, which is the problem of finding profiles in a social network that contain information about a given target via automated crawling. We formalize TONIC as a search problem and a best-first approach is proposed for solving it. Several heuristics are presented to guide this search. These heuristics are based on the topology of the currently known part of the social network. The efficiency of the proposed heuristics and the effect of the graph topology on their performance is experimentally evaluated on the Google+ social network.
Richard Sullivan - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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covid 19 and the rise of participatory sigint an examination of the rise in government surveillance through mobile applications
American Journal of Public Health, 2020Co-Authors: Rose Bernard, Gemma Bowsher, Richard SullivanAbstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a significant growth in government surveillance techniques globally, primarily through the use of cell phone applications. However, although these applications can have actionable effects on public health efforts to control pandemics, the participatory or voluntary nature of these measures is obscuring the relationship between health information and traditional government surveillance techniques, potentially preventing effective oversight. Public health measures have traditionally been resistant to the integration of government-led Intelligence techniques, such as signals Intelligence (SIGINT), because of ethical and legal issues arising from the nature of surveillance techniques.We explore this rise of participatory SIGINT and its nature as an extension of biosurveillance through 3 drivers: the rise of surveillance capitalism, the exploitation of a public health crisis to obscure state of exception politics with a moral imperative, and the historically enduring nature of emergency-implemented surveillance measures.We conclude that although mobile applications may indeed be useful in containing pandemics, they should be subject to similar oversight and regulation as other government Intelligence Collection techniques. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print October 15, 2020: e1-e6. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305912).