publishes Country Reports on Terrorism, which highlights current strategies, outcomes and casualties from U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The 2008 report highlights the growing trend in terrorist attacks abroad, including the September attack against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen that killed 18 people. The continued incidence of terrorism prompts us to consider its root causes. It is popular to sing...

In this paper, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles that discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from CDA and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are re...

Traditionally, social concerns such as freedom and privacy have been addressed by complex systems of laws, norms, and cultural beliefs. While the growing use of computers and other technologies has raised serious questions about the future of these civil liberties, so far policymakers have primarily sought answers in terms of legal remedies rather than the technologies themselves. This is due, ...

Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors...

<p>As one of the states exception, a state natural disaster often makes public administration, including local governments, take actions that restrict sphere human rights and civil liberties. One-person bodies are entrusted with being in charge matters related to disaster. Actions taken during prevent or remove its effects managed by commune executive body when was introduced only territo...

Radio Frequency Identification, RFID, is an item-tagging technology which interests suppliers and retailers. RFID has potential to revolutionise supply chain management but also some potentially distressing social implications. When used inappropriately, RFID is capable of reducing or eliminating customer anonymity, thereby damaging privacy and threatening civil liberties. I begin with an intro...

Why do developing countries prove so resistant to the rule of law? The problem is all the more paradoxical because the institutional technologies for providing the rule of law – systems of property rights, civil rights, and personal liberties, general incorporation laws, corporate governance structures, contract law, and judicial systems – is relatively well-known. To address these questions, I...

This article explores public concerns about the US Department of Homeland Security’s data ‘fusion centers’. These centers, which are proliferating across all US states, coordinate data-sharing among state and local police, intelligence agencies, and private companies. The primary goal of fusion centers is to engage in intelligence-sharing for counter-terrorism purposes. However, they have been ...