‘Two bodhisattvas from the East’: Minhe Monguor funeral orations

This paper presents and analyzes the texts and performance context of funeral orations for Monguor living in Minhe Hui and Monguor Autonomous County, Qinghai Province, China. The orations provide an important insight into the Minhe Monguor religious worldview. It is further noted that the longer, more traditional orations are now rarely given and that the Minhe Monguor funeral orations differ considerably from those heard in Huzhu Monguor Autonomous County, also located in Qinghai.     

Human-cyber Nexus: the parallels between ‘illegal’ intelligence operations and advanced persistent threats

‘Illegals’ are extensively trained individuals dispatched abroad under false identities with no observable links to their operating country. Technology has made possible a new kind of ‘virtual illegal,’ one that extends beyond the operating country’s borders without putting a human at risk. When this is done in a targeted manner by a sophisticated attacker it is called an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). This article draws from historical illegals cases to identify parallels in the preparation, insertion, and control of malware by APTs. Ultimately, the methods for countering the two parallel phenomena can also be similar, despite their physical differences.     

Can the U.S. government legally monitor private communications? If so,given the U.S.'s significant protection of privacy rights,what government cannot?

Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA/CSS is the most important case ever regarding whether a government can monitor private communications. This case's discussion could not be any more timely for public affairs purposes. Given continuing terrorist attacks and concomitant calls for private industries, such as Wikimedia Foundation, to do more to stop the spread of violence and rhetoric on the Internet, there has never been a more important time to consider what limits should be placed on government's access to personal data in the quest to prevent terrorism. Here, the district court referred to the plaintiffs' injuries from NSA upstream surveillance as speculative, denying them Article III standing. The Fourth Circuit reinstated Wikimedia Foundation as a plaintiff, finding sufficient allegations for it to survive a facial challenge to Article III standing based on the Wikimedia Allegation. However, the other plaintiffs, relying on the Dragnet Allegation, were properly dismissed based on lacking standing. Until more details of upstream surveillance become public, suing under a dragnet theory should prove difficult. In fact, lobbying the legislative and executive branches to enact changes could be more effective and efficient than relying on the courts.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.