Generating a Corpus of Mobile Forensic Images for Masquerading user Experimentation

The Periodic Mobile Forensics (PMF) system investigates user behavior on mobile devices. It applies forensic techniques to an enterprise mobile infrastructure, utilizing an on‐device agent named TractorBeam. The agent collects changed storage locations for later acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis. TractorBeam provides its data to an enterprise infrastructure that consists of a cloud‐based queuing service, relational database, and analytical framework for running forensic processes. During a 3‐month experiment with Purdue University, TractorBeam was utilized in a simulated operational setting across 34 users to evaluate techniques to identify masquerading users (i.e., users other than the intended device user). The research team surmises that all masqueraders are undesirable to an enterprise, even when a masquerader lacks malicious intent. The PMF system reconstructed 821 forensic images, extracted one million audit events, and accurately detected masqueraders. Evaluation revealed that developed methods reduced storage requirements 50‐fold. This paper describes the PMF architecture, performance of TractorBeam throughout the protocol, and results of the masquerading user analysis.     

LGBTQ-Affirming Policing: Tactics Generated by Law Enforcement Personnel

Law enforcement personnel (LEP) use a variety of tactics to perform their job duties. Although LEP often receive specialized training to work with ethnocultural minorities and are sometimes trained to work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) citizens, a clear articulation of LGBTQ-affirming police tactics has not yet been established. Using qualitative content analysis and a multiple case study approach, this project identified a variety of tactics generated by LEP in written surveys and group discussion of scenarios involving LGBTQ citizens. Results showed that across all scenarios, LEP were able to generate LGBTQ-affirming tactics, including both typical police procedures, as well as approaches specific to LGBTQ citizens. Non LGBTQ-affirming tactics typically reflected reluctance to adapt general procedures to meet the needs of LGBTQ citizens. The results of this study support the use of group-based scenario training to help LEP identify and adopt LGBTQ-affirming approaches. This study is significant because it represents a first step toward identifying best practices for LGBTQ-affirming police tactics.     

Highway Robbery: Testing the Impact of Interstate Highways on Robbery

Research has shown that the occurrence of crime is based on multiple factors including a variety of geographical characteristics. Previous researchers have suggested that the environmental feature of the interstate system has an influence on crime. For this study, we test for a relationship between interstate presence and robbery at the county-level in Georgia. Additionally, we test whether or not urban/rural differences affect this relationship. Findings are consistent with previous research showing that the number of interstate exits in a county significantly increases crime; in this case the robbery rate.     

Environmental pollution: corporate crime and cancer mortality

Corporate crime remains more costly and arguably more harmful than street crime and such harms include environmental, air, and water pollution resulting in increasing cancer mortality rates around the globe. More importantly, these corporate crimes are global in nature and facilitated by transnational corporations’ capture of the USA Environmental Protection Agency.     

Entrapment Through the Lens of the Actio Libera in Causa

The entrapment defense is a puzzle of long standing. One the one hand, we are offended by the government’s subjecting someone vulnerable to extreme temptation. It seems like something anyone might fall prey to. On the other hand, it is hard to explain why someone who actually commits, or attempts a crime, and who would be liable if anyone other than the government had tempted him, should escape punishment. His blameworthiness seems the same. This essay seeks to illuminate this puzzle by showing how it parallels the long-standing debate surrounding the criminal law problem of the actio libera in causa—situations in which someone seeks to escape liability by contriving to put a certain defense in place, such as provoking his victim into attacking him, so that he can then kill him in self-defense. The parallels between the two problems do not serve to resolve either, but make them appear in a rather different light.     

Policy Spaces: Applying Lefebvrian Politics in Neo-institutional Spaces

The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of conceptualising policy institutions as neo-institutional spaces. The goal of this paper is to promote a more collaborative policy-making process that recognises the importance of cultivating and articulating shared spatial interests between policy actors. To facilitate a more collaborative process, the paper applies the principles of Lefebvre's triad to understand the internal and external policy geographies that inform government decision-making and promote the stability or instability of policy sub-systems. The utility of the proposed approach is examined within the context of two proposed scenarios. The paper concludes that a new policy geography might be effectively used to promote the overall political viability of policy sub-systems.     

Understanding the Crisis in Sudan

Instances of discontent within colonial military establishments in Africa have largely been ignored by historians of colonial Africa. The heavy focus on the incidence of coups in the historiography has helped to obscure the privations suffered by African soldiers in colonial armies. Using the Sierra Leone experience, this study draws on hitherto untapped archival material to examine the complex causes of the “Gunners' Mutiny” of January 1939. While showing that the causes of mutinies could be significantly nuanced, the study helps to bridge a vital gap in Sierra Leone's history.