A survey of current social network and online communication provision policies to support law enforcement identify offenders

Online forms of harassment, stalking and bullying on social network and communication platforms are now arguably wide-spread and subject to regular media coverage. As these provision continue to attract millions of users, generating significant volumes of traffic, regulating abuse and effectively reprimanding those who are involved in it, is a difficult and sometimes impossible task. This article collates information acquired from 22 popular social network and communication platforms in order to identify current regulatory gaps. Terms of service and privacy policies are reviewed to assess existing practices of data retention to evaluate the feasibility of law enforcement officials tracking those whose actions breach the law. For each provision, account sign-up processes are evaluated and policies for retaining Internet Protocol logs and user account information are assessed along with the availability of account preservation orders. Finally, recommendations are offered for improving current approaches to regulating social network crime and online offender tracking.     

Reputational leadership and preference similarity: Explaining organisational collaboration in bank policy networks

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. This article seeks to develop new analytical tools for testing these alternative hypotheses. First, it measures whether perceptions of reputational leadership affect the likelihood of an organisation being the target or instigator of collaboration with others. Second, it tests whether the degree of preference similarity between two organisations makes them more or less likely to collaborate. The article adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining exponential random graph models (ERGM) with qualitative interviews, to analyse and explain organisational collaboration around United Kingdom banking reform. It is found that reputational leadership and preference similarity exert a strong, positive and complementary effect on network formation. In particular, leadership is significant whether this is measured as an organisational attribute or as an individually held perception. Evidence is also found of closed or clique‐like network structures, and heterophily effects based on organisational type. These results offer significant new insights into the formation of policy networks in the banking sector and the drivers of collaboration between financial organisations.     

Military genomic testing: proportionality,expected benefits,and the connection between genotypes and phenotypes

Mehlman and Li offer a framework for approaching the bioethical issues raised by the military use of genomics that is compellingly grounded in both the contemporary civilian and military ethics of medical research, arguing that military commanders must be bound by the two principles of paternalism and proportionality. I agree fully. But I argue here that this is a much higher bar than we may fully realize. Just as the principle of proportionality relies upon a thorough assessment of harms caused and military advantage gained, the use of genomic research, on Mehlman and Li''s view, will require an accurate understanding of the connection between genotypes and phenotypes – accurate enough to ameliorate the risk undertaken by our armed forces in being subject to such research. Recent conceptual work in evolutionary theory and the philosophy of biology, however, renders it doubtful that such knowledge is forthcoming. The complexity of the relationship between genotypic factors and realized traits (the so-called ‘G→P map’) makes the estimation of potential military advantage, as well as potential harm to our troops, incredibly challenging. Such fundamental conceptual challenges call into question our ability to ever satisfactorily satisfy the demands of a sufficiently rigorous ethical standard.     

网络环境下的法医学循证

法医学是当前司法鉴定中的重要组成部分,其研究内容广泛,具有高度的专业性。随着网络技术的发展、信息资源的增加以及人们法律意识的增强,法医学必然会面临许多新问题,对诉讼证据的要求标准也越来越高。鉴于此,在法医学领域应建立起循证的理念,通过循证的方式在法医学以及相关领域内寻求最合适的解决法医学实务中具体问题的证据,循证不但能够及时解决法医学领域的现行问题,其对于法医学的进步与发展也将具有重大的推动作用。本文综述了循证的基本理论及其在法医学领域的作用,以及循证的途径、方法、证据的评价,并探讨网络环境下法医学循证的应用价值。     

How women use family networks to facilitate migration: A comparative study of Irish and Polish women in Britain

Within migration studies there has been a tendency to focus on a single case study of a particular national group. Adopting a comparative approach may raise new and interesting questions or challenge conventional thinking on migration. While on the surface, at least, Irish and Polish migrants would appear to have many commonalities, there has been surprisingly little comparative analysis of these two groups. Drawing on my own research on these migrants in the British context, I focus on women as a large but under-researched aspect of both groups. This paper suggests ways in which such a comparison could be undertaken by using social networks as a useful comparative tool. A social networks perspective not only allows a probing analysis of migration strategies, but also provides a framework within which to compare across different migrant groups, such as for example, examining the role of family networks (here and there) in migration processes. In addition, this approach enables an examination of dynamism over time and how migrants develop relationships within spatially dispersed as well as locally embedded ties.     

Partners in crime? Post-release recidivism among solo and co-offenders in Norway

ABSTRACT

Co-offending may increase offenders’ criminal capital in ways that impact their subsequent offending behaviour, and while highly theorized, the relationship between co-offending and reoffending has received less attention in empirical research. This study relies on Norwegian registry data to explore patterns of registered co- and solo offending before and after offenders’ first release from prison, by assessing differences in total, solo and co-reoffending between (1) co-offenders and solo offenders and (2) co-offenders embedded in different co-offending networks. The sample is based on 10 complete release cohorts, and co-offending networks are constructed from 22 years of administrative police data. Egocentric network analysis is used to obtain measures of degree centrality and tie strength. Results show that recidivism rates are higher among individuals with a co-offending network at release, and there is a consistent, positive relationship between degree centrality and reoffending. There is also a positive correlation between time spent in prison and the likelihood of co-offending after release, but there are no incidents of repeated co-offending (i.e. reoffending with co-offenders acquired before incarceration). The analysis hereby confirms several well-known patterns of co-offending in a new national context and highlights how incarceration can shape the nature and longevity of egocentric co-offending network ties.     

The Architecture of Drug Trafficking: Network Forms of Organisation in the Colombian Cocaine Trade

For much of the past twenty-five years, the US-led war on drugs has been premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of Colombian drug trade. Instead of being run by a handful of massive, price-fixing ‘cartels’, the Colombian drug trade, then and now, was characterized by a fluid social system where flexible exchange networks expanded and retracted according to market opportunities and regulatory constraints. To support this interpretation, I draw on primary and secondary source data I collected in Colombia and the US, including interviews with several dozen hard-to-reach informants. I analyze these data to analyze the organisational form and functioning of ‘Colombian’ trafficking networks, focusing on how these illicit enterprises communicate, coordinate their activities, and make decisions, with an eye towards deflating some of the more persistent myths that have grown up around these transnational enterprises.     

The BALCO scandal: the social structure of a steroid distribution network

The current study revisits the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal involving the production and distribution of an undetectable anabolic-androgenic steroid to professional athletes from late 1990s until 2003. Multiple sources are reviewed to re-create the social structure of BALCO and examine whether it formed a close-knit community or instead multiple communities defined around a specific sport or discipline. Results from a community fragmentation analysis suggest that six communities could be identified as distinct in the BALCO network of 97 individuals – three structured around athletic interests (baseball, football and boxing), one around BALCO's chemist, another around the eventual whistle-blower, and a ‘broker’ community, labelled the network's core. The network's core functioned as the best intermediate between communities because of the diversity of actors involved and the presence of BALCO's founder (Conte), who was brokering ties all over the network, though such a structure ultimately resulted in complete demise of the BALCO network.     

The multiplexity of political conspiracy: illegal networks and the collapse of Watergate

Using historical data from the United State's Watergate criminal conspiracy case, we construct five sociomatrices representing the multiplex social relations of political conspiracy. Sociomatrices representing (1) the social relations of the illegal relations among the conspirators, (2) fractious relations between the conspirators during the working period of the conspiracy, (3) fractious relations between the conspirators during the crisis stage of the conspiracy, (4) the flow of money among the conspirators and (5) the relations of which specific conspirators testified against specific other co-conspirators. The quadratic assignment procedure (QAP analysis) is used to determine the extent to which these five sociomatrices are inter-related. QAP analysis shows that the structure of the five sociomatrices are related to each other, implying that political conspiracies are composed of multiplex relations of working acts of deviance, relations of dyadic fractiousness, conduits of illegal financing and the betrayal of co-conspirators through finger pointing at trial.