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.     

Cognitive Dissonance in Social Work

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension occurring when a person holds two psychologically inconsistent cognitions. For this study, 21 social workers who facilitate transracial adoption plans for Aboriginal children in British Columbia were interviewed: 1) Do social workers who facilitate transracial adoption plans for Aboriginal children experience cognitive dissonance? If so, in what ways? 2) How does cognitive dissonance impact them? 3) In what ways do social workers reconcile a sense of dissonance? Findings suggest that social workers do experience cognitive dissonance, that they are adversely impacted, and that they find ways to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.     

Exploring the potential of stricter gun restrictions for people with serious mental illness to reduce homicide in the United States

This study explores the potential that current efforts to limit access to firearms for individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) have for reducing overall rates of murder by firearm in the United States. Official arrest, court and health records provided data on personal and offense characteristics of 95 individuals with SMI and 423 without, all of whom had been convicted of murder in the State of Indiana between 1990 and 2002. Bivariate analyses examined differences between the two groups and logistic regression models examined the relationship between SMI and offense characteristics. Compared to those without, a relatively small proportion of convicted murderers had a diagnosis indicating SMI. The presence of SMI was associated with reduced likelihood of targeting a stranger and was not associated with having multiple-victims or firearm use. Focusing on access to firearms exclusively by individuals with SMI will have little impact on multiple-victim or firearm-related homicides.     

Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis

While we know that emotional reactions are important influences on political behavior, we know far less about the sources of these emotions. This paper studies the causes of fear and anger in reaction to a negative stimulus: the financial crisis. Anger should have been experienced among individuals who believed a specific actor was to blame for the crisis. Moreover, individuals should have been particularly angry if they blamed an actor who should be accountable to them, for example the national government. I test these expectations using a panel survey run in Britain between 2005 and 2010. This data shows that British citizens experienced anger if they held an actor responsible for the crisis. Moreover, they felt particularly angry if they held the Labour government (and to a lesser extent the European Union) responsible. These findings underline the importance of studying the causes of emotional reactions and show how these may be linked to common institutional distinctions between political systems.     

Which Issues do Parties Emphasise? Salience Strategies and Party Organisation in Multiparty Systems

Party system issue agendas are formed by the topics that individual parties decide to address, and these salience decisions are likely to be strategic. Two key strategies are commonly discussed in the literature: parties’ focus on (1) issues that they have ownership over and (2) issues that currently concern voters. Yet it is not known what explains the extent to which parties pursue each of these strategies. This paper argues that aspects of party organisation influence which salience strategy is pursued. Parties that have more resources will be able to ‘ride the wave’ of current concerns while parties with fewer resources are more likely to focus on their best issues. Furthermore, policy-seeking parties with strong activist influence will be less likely to ‘ride the wave’ and more likely to follow issue ownership strategies. An analysis of 105 election manifestos from 27 elections in 17 countries shows that aspects of party organisation are indeed strong and robust moderators of issue ownership strategies. Limited, albeit mixed, evidence is also found that party organisation affects the use of ‘riding the wave’ strategies. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party competition and voter representation.     

Parliamentary control of CSDP: the case of the EU's fight against piracy off the Somali coast

Parliamentary involvement remains a key tool for the democratic control of executive policies. This article explores the web of parliamentary involvement in decision-making on European Union (EU) military operations, using insights gained in an in-depth case study on the EU's anti-piracy mission Atalanta. We find that parliaments at all levels became involved only after key political decisions had already been made. At the member state level, we find highly uneven involvement with only some parliaments being very well informed and closely monitoring, if not influencing government policy. The European Parliament became active only after the launch of the mission but then scrutinised it intensely, profiting (in contrast to national parliaments) from its access to top military officials and key decision-makers. Finally, transnational parliamentary assemblies as well as more informal networks provided opportunities to transmit information across the boundaries of individual parliaments and party-groups thus potentially enhancing the ability of parliamentarians to scrutinise government policies.     

A human rights-based approach to sex offender management: The key to effective public protection?

Abstract

This paper outlines recent ‘public protection’ legislation in the United States of America as a basis for considering possible outcomes when public concern and political pressures combine without due regard for efficacy and appropriate balance. It highlights concerns about the implications of policy measures developing in this way and questions whether a human-rights based approach should be applied in terms of public protection policy in order to develop more effective public protection.     

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945–46

At the end of the Second World War, British and Zionist interests came into conflict over the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which raised the broader issue of what sort of National Home could exist within the British Mandate. As a result, in 1945–46, the three Jewish armed groups in the Mandate, the Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, started a loosely coordinated armed struggle against British rule. Even the moderates in the Jewish Agency rejected their former partner against Hitler, Britain, and used force against it in order to achieve their political goals. This article assesses British intelligence on these developments, and demonstrates that it failed to anticipate or even to understand the threat until the destruction of the King David Hotel. The article demonstrates that these mistakes occurred because British intelligence relied heavily on the intelligence organs of the Jewish Agency itself for intelligence about political threats within Palestine. The article assesses this intelligence failure, and its heavy costs. However, it denies that bad intelligence caused British failures in the Mandate. On the contrary, that failure stemmed from deeper problems of policy.