African intelligence services: early postcolonial and contemporary challenges

Author(s):  
Paul Banda
Author(s):  
Nico van Eijk

The point of departure for this chapter is the decision of the European Court of Justice in the Digital Rights Ireland case, which annulled the European Data Retention Directive, in part because the use of retained data was not made subject to independent oversight. Next, it examines judgments from the national courts of the Netherlands and the UK, also focusing on the independent oversight issue, declaring invalid the data retention laws of those two countries. From the Digital Rights Ireland case and others, seven standards for oversight of intelligence services can be drawn: the oversight should be complete; it should encompass all stages of the intelligence cycle; it should be independent; it should take place prior to the imposition of a measure; it should be able to declare a measure unlawful and to provide redress; it should incorporate the adversary principle; and it should have sufficient resources.


Author(s):  
Raymond J. Batvinis

Counterintelligence is the business of identifying and dealing with foreign intelligence threats to a nation, such as the United States. Its main concern is the intelligence services of foreign states and similar organizations of non-state actors, such as transnational terrorist groups. Counterintelligence functions both as a defensive measure that protects the nation's secrets and assets against foreign intelligence penetration and as an offensive measure to find out what foreign intelligence organizations are planning to defeat better their aim. This article addresses the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) foreign counterintelligence function. It briefly traces its evolution by examining the key events and the issues that effected its growth as the principle civilian counterintelligence service of the U.S. government.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Laurent Tatu ◽  
Jean-Paul Feugeas

Botulinum toxin is nowadays approved as an effective medication for various neurological disorders. The extreme toxicity of this toxin-inducing botulism, a severe lethal muscle-paralyzing illness, has been well known since the seminal works of the end of the 19th century. Because of this toxicity, botulinum toxin was one of the first agents to be considered for use as a biological weapon. The Second World War was a crucial period for the first attempts to weaponize this toxin even if many unknown factors about botulinum toxin still existed at the outbreak of the war. Using documents from the British National Archives and other published sources, we discuss the main points of the attempts to weaponize this toxin in German and Allied armies. During WW2, Allied intelligence services regularly reported a major German threat related to the potential use of botulinum toxin as a biological weapon, especially during the preparation of <i>Operation Overlord</i>, the Allied invasion to liberate Europe. All these reports would ultimately prove to be inaccurate: botulinum toxin was not part of the German military arsenal even if some German scientists tried to use the results of the French pre-war military research. Misinformation spread by intelligence services stimulated military research at Porton Down facilities in England and at Camp Detrick in the USA. These studies led to a succession of failures and myths about the weaponization of botulinum toxin. Nevertheless, major progress (purification, toxoid) arose from the military research, providing useful data for the first steps of the therapeutic use of botulinum toxin in the post-war years.


Diogenes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 121-129
Author(s):  
Mark Fenster

This essay describes the emergence of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an object of conspiratorial intrigue and imagination, offering a snapshot of the “9/11 truth movement” and its various theories as they began to reach full bloom. Theories about the attacks have come to constitute the dominant conspiratorial present – a present that looks remarkably like the mid- and late-twentieth-century past, despite significant changes in information technology and the continuing institutionalization and ironization of conspiracy theory as an influential form of popular politics. In addition to the 9/11 conspiracy community, the essay considers the battle over the 9/11 Commission’s review of the government’s failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks. The Commission engaged in knowing and savvy efforts to respond to conspiracy theories and to preempt popular belief in them, offering an authoritative narrative (or, more precisely, set of narratives) to explain what occurred. Meanwhile, the 9/11 truth movement made equally knowing and savvy efforts to critique the official account, responding with its own efforts to reinterpret and re-narrate the attacks, their causes, and what they signify about the contemporary world. While the 9/11 Commission may have criticized the federal government and its intelligence services for their failures of imagination prior to the attacks, the truth movement criticized the Commission either for a failure of imagination – an explanation for the attacks that could see through the “official” account – or for a quite imaginative cover-up of the hidden truths of 9/11. By considering the clash between official authorities and an active conspiracy community, this essay considers how the movement attempted to form a collective political and scholarly community, producing a blizzard of texts offering narratives that compete with the ones told by the Commission that seek the impossible grail of conspiracy theory: the truth. The essay also considers the effects, if any, of the state’s attempt to preempt and respond to conspiracy theories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 75-82
Author(s):  
P. V. Troshchinskiy ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of the process of introducing digital technologies into the work of the People’s Courts of China and the issues of its legal regulation. The judicial system of the modern Chinese state is based on courts of three levels and two courts. Judicial bodies include the Supreme People’s Court, local people's courts, military courts and other special courts. For several years, various digital technologies have been used in all Chinese courts. In addition, since August 2017, special Internet courts have appeared in the PRC (three such courts have now been created in Hangzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou), which consider civil, administrative and criminal cases online without the personal presence of participants. The use of digital technologies in the judicial system of the PRC contributes to its transparency, reducing corruption, combating the spread of coronavirus, increasing the general level of legal literacy of the people. So, the creation of a unified platform for online broadcasting of court hearings online, the public disclosure of court sentences (decisions, rulings) in various categories of cases allows society to control the activities of the people's courts of the country. Considering the case online during the confrontation of the coronavirus epidemic prevents the spread of infection among participants in the process. The experience of China in the large-scale implementation of digital technologies in judicial activity is not only of scientific interest, but also important from a practical point of view for the Russian expert community. The Russian Federation has also embarked on the path of using digital technologies in litigation, but China is following it ahead of the schedule, which is important in terms of studying the results it has achieved and the mistakes made so that the Russian legislator can take them into account in their law-making activities. It is also important that China, in the process of digitalizing its national system, uses exclusively national platforms and databases. Access to information by foreign intelligence services is not possible. The main providers of digital services for the judicial system are also national corporations, which legally have the status of private companies, but in fact they are completely controlled by the СРС.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-80
Author(s):  
Douglas Selvage

Abstract This second part of a two-part article moves ahead in showing how the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) came to play a key role in the disinformation campaign launched by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) in 1983 regarding the origins of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The KGB launched the campaign itself, but in the mid-1980s it sought to widen the effort by enlisting the cooperation of intelligence services in other Warsaw Pact countries, especially the Stasi. From the autumn of 1986 until November 1989, the Stasi played a central role in the disinformation campaign. Despite pressure from the U.S. government and a general inclination of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to curtail the campaign by the end of 1987, both the KGB and the USSR's official Novosti press agency continued until 1989 to spread false allegations that HIV was a U.S. biological weapon. Even after the KGB curtailed its disinformation in 1989, the Stasi continued to disseminate falsehoods, not least because it had successfully maintained plausible deniability regarding its role in the campaign. The Stasi worked behind the scenes to support the work of Soviet–East German scientists Jakob Segal and Lilli Segal and to facilitate dissemination of the Segals’ views in West Germany and Great Britain, especially through the leftwing media, and to purvey broader disinformation about HIV/AIDS by attacking U.S. biological and chemical weapons in general.


2013 ◽  
Vol 670 ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
D. Wu ◽  
Q.X. Hu ◽  
Y. Yao

Facing the abundant service resources, how to make the heterogeneous distributed resources information system has the meaning that can be understand between man-machine and machines, search conveniently and implement the resources integration, achieve information access and query better as well as the interoperability between systems, it is a challenge it faces which implementing the resources sharing and intelligence services, but also a problem which to improve the service informatization level for RM industries to be solved. To facility services resource sharing in Rapid Manufacturing (RM) industry, mainly discussed demand analysis and establishment principle of RM domain ontology. Based on the many years of experience and enterprise instances, domain ontology was described conceptual and expressed knowledgeable and model structure was established. The knowledge representation method is adopted based on the domain ontology query model and partial examples of service description are given. In order to solve semantic fuzziness and realize integration, interoperability and reusability of enterprise service by building domain ontology which can satisfy shared understanding of interested parties. On this basis, integrated service system architecture was designed to support resource sharing. The methods had been applied preliminarily and would provide the basis for the future work and extended field.


1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
John W. Barker ◽  
Francis Dvornik

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document