‘Within or outside Canada’: The Charter’s application to the extraterritorial activities of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service

Since the swift passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act in 2015, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has had the unprecedented and highly controversial authority to take ‘reasonable and proportionate’ measures to reduce threats to Canadian security. While there are some limits to the types of measures CSIS can employ, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act permits the use of measures that would otherwise contravene the laws of Canada or limit a right protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms so long as they are judicially authorized by the Federal Court. As new threats proliferate around the world, it is anticipated that CSIS will increasingly carry out this mandate overseas. Yet review bodies tasked with monitoring CSIS’s use of threat reduction measures (TRMs) report that CSIS has never sought judicial authorization to conduct a TRM. Why? One answer may be that CSIS has concluded that the Charter does not govern actions carried out abroad, and, as such, their extraterritorial conduct falls beyond the reach and oversight of the Federal Court. Whether the Charter applies to CSIS’s overseas conduct ostensibly lies in the Supreme Court of Canada’s leading case on the extraterritorial application of the Charter, R. v Hape. This article canvasses domestic and international law, as well as intelligence law theory, to explain why that presumption is wrong. Wrong, not least because the majority opinion in Hape is deeply flawed in its analysis and application of international law. But also, because intelligence operations are so distinguishable from the transnational criminal investigations at issue in Hape, the Court’s findings are inapplicable in the former context. In short, this article demonstrates that applying Hape to the actions of CSIS officers not only leaves their actions beyond the scrutiny of Canadian courts but also creates a significant human rights gap.

Multilevel Marketing: Inner Workings, Socioeconomic Effects and the Islamic Juridical View

The intent of this article is to highlight the origins and development of multilevel marketing, its inner workings, and Islamic juridical views on its activities. One group of Muslim scholars permits it while others forbid it. The view forbidding it is the majority opinion. The juridical viewpoint forbidding multilevel marketing is more convincing than the view permitting it because of research-based evidence highlighting the reality of its inner workings, its socioeconomic harms and stronger juristic arguments opposing it. The inner workings of multilevel market reveal why the majority opinion forbids this so-called business model. This article aims to introduce a sharia-compliant version of the multilevel marketing model which may align with the Islamic perspective.

Stakes and expertise modulate conformity in economic choice

The influences of expertise and group size on an individual’s tendency to align with a majority opinion have been attributed to informational and normative conformity, respectively: Whereas the former refers to the treatment of others’ decisions as proxies for outcomes, the latter involves positive affect elicited by group membership. In this study, using a social gambling task, we pitted alignment with a high- vs. low-expertise majority against a hypothetical monetary reward, thus relating conformity to a broader literature on valuation and choice, and probed the countering influence of a high-expertise minority opinion. We found that the expertise of a countering minority group significantly modulated alignment with a low-expertise majority, but only if such alignment did not come at a cost. Conversely, participants’ knowledge of payoff probabilities predicted the degree of majority alignment only when a high-expertise majority endorsed a more costly option. Implications for the relative influences of expertise and stakes on conformity are discussed.

Restorations in post-war period

The choice of the monument care methodology depends not only on the preference of the author of the restoration or the opinion of a professional monument commission, but also on the state in which the historic building is and historical stages it developed through. After the Second World War, much of the architectural historical heritage in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia was devastated, and the then professional society faced challenges of how to restore and preserve these destroyed buildings. The following article explains the starting points and selected methods of post-war monument care on the example of three churches in the former Czechoslovakia. Buildings selected for comparison originated in approximately the same epoch, underwent a rather complex building developments, and the extent of their damage was also similar. Specifically, we focus on the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Handlová, the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Bíňa and the Church of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Slavic Patrons in Prague. Although the three compared cases show similarities, different restoration methodologies were used. The majority opinion of the then professional public tended towards reconstructing historic buildings to the state before their destruction, as is also evident in the cases being compared. Nevertheless, each of the churches is restored with some deviations from the original condition. In the case of the church in Bíňa, we follow traces of a purist reconstruction, in Prague we witness a restoration by indicative reconstruction, also applied in Handlová, where, moreover, the methodology of reconstruction to the state before destruction was completely abandoned. Our ambition is to point out the diversity of opinion in the care of monuments, which at that time saw a change in paradigm and began to accept authors’ new inputs while preserving the historical essence of the building.

Democracy of the Dead? The Relevance of Majority Opinion in Theology

Chapter 11 explores whether the majority opinion in Christian theology should be deferred to, or strongly preferred, whether it be the majority opinion over the history of the church (as in G. K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”) or the majority opinion of contemporary theologians. It is argued that because of the vast differences in accessible evidence between past and present-day theologians, diachronic majority opinion is not a good indicator of where the truth lies. In the synchronic case, ignorance of minority arguments, biases, selection effects, and the difficulty to deciding who gets to vote present many opportunities for majorities to be wrong. Finally, it is considered whether the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit could rescue the democracy of the dead, but the conclusion is reached that given the gentle way God corrects us, diachronic majority opinion, apart from belief in a very basic set of truths, is not epistemically bolstered by the Spirit.

Constructions of Moral Values in Reader Comments of the Samantha Sex Robot Discourse in East African Newspapers

Although artificial intelligence (ai) has been touted as revolutionary, this technology has sparked ethical concerns, with man accused of attempting to create a ‘play God’ with it. While creators of sex robots have been hailed for reigniting sexual relationships, they have received flack in equal measure for their apparent moral absurdity. From a Christian values perspective, this study interrogates how the Samantha sex robot invention was framed in 129 online reader comments in two East African newspapers – The Standard and The Daily Monitor. Findings showed that comments fell under the value themes of ‘family bond’, ‘compromised conscience’, and ‘apocalypse’. While a few positioned sex robots as a panacea to domestic instability, the majority opinion viewed the robots as ‘destroyers’ of the God-ordained family unit and tools of dehumanizing women, and thus morally contradictory to Christian teachings. Justifying sex robots was considered to be ‘negotiating’ or ‘rationalizing’ with established Christian values and therefore ‘rebelling against God’. Man’s extremity with the creation and use of sex robots sparked predictions of a self-fulfilling prophecy of his extermination for inciting the wrath of God. The preservation of culture also underpinned the ethical evaluations of robots by some commenters.

Optimizing voting order on sequential juries: a median voter theorem and beyond

We consider an odd-sized “jury”, which votes sequentially between two equiprobable states of Nature (say A and B, or Innocent and Guilty), with the majority opinion determining the verdict. Jurors have private information in the form of a signal in $$[-1,+1]$$ [ - 1 , + 1 ] , with higher signals indicating A more likely. Each juror has an ability in [0, 1], which is proportional to the probability of A given a positive signal, an analog of Condorcet’s p for binary signals. We assume that jurors vote honestly for the alternative they view more likely, given their signal and prior voting, because they are experts who want to enhance their reputation (after their vote and actual state of Nature is revealed). For a fixed set of jury abilities, the reliability of the verdict depends on the voting order. For a jury of size three, the optimal ordering is always as follows: middle ability first, then highest ability, then lowest. For sufficiently heterogeneous juries, sequential voting is more reliable than simultaneous voting and is in fact optimal (allowing for non-honest voting). When average ability is fixed, verdict reliability is increasing in heterogeneity. For medium-sized juries, we find through simulation that the median ability juror should still vote first and the remaining ones should have increasing and then decreasing abilities.

Impact of Private TV Channels and its Commodification of Religious Programs

Purpose: This paper examined some societies; religion itself is a complex subject, and then creating its content in the media is no less of a challenge. Especially in a society like Pakistan, where people are more sensitive in the name of religion and what is being said on TV soon spreads like wildfire on social media. The study looked at the extent to which Pakistani TV channels believe in commercialism and how far they can go for this purpose. To what extent has the aspect of commodification been embedded in Pakistani TV channels? One of the purposes of this research is to obtain and rate advertisements for the content produced and presented for TV. The questions are severe, and two different approaches have been adopted in the research method to find the answers. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study deals with the religious media contents and its public. This method is most commonly used in clinical research, schools, social organizations, or the research in which the domain is fixed. The systematic random sampling technique is applied in the selection of contents. This study reveals the religious commercialization and commodification done by Pakistani television channels. Due to the specification of the nature of TV contents, relevance is the most obvious factor. Findings: The finding shows that the majority opinion, the religious qualifications of the anchors of religious programs or their grasp on religious subjects are not much appreciated? In addition, the analysis of the material revealed that commercial advertisements run during religious shows on Pakistani TV channels. Still, at the same time, segments are also produced on a commercial basis.. Implications/Originality/Value: Religious content can be studied from further angles with regard to innovation and change for commercial purposes. These include the use of music, the movements of anchors in religious shows, the dissent of religious scholars, the use of glamor in religious programs, and the sale of life in the name of religion.

Impact of Private TV Channels and its Commodification of Religious Programs

In some societies, religion itself is a complex subject and then creating its content in the media is no less of a challenge. Especially in a society like Pakistan where people are more sensitive in the name of religion and what is being said on TV soon spreads like wildfire on social media. The study looked at the extent to which Pakistani TV channels believe in commercialism and how far they can go for this purpose. To what extent has the aspect of commodification been embedded in Pakistani TV channels? One of the purposes of this research is to obtain and rate advertisements for the content produced and presented for TV. The questions are very serious and two different approaches have been adopted in the research method to find the answers. On the one hand, the survey sought the opinion of male and female students who were equally divided into undergraduate and graduate categories. On the other hand, in the Islamic and Hijri month of Ramadan 2019, the content of AREY Digital and Geo TV's Sehri and Iftar transmissions were compared. Numerical method was adopted for. In the majority opinion, the religious qualifications of the anchors of religious programs or their grasp on religious subjects is not much appreciated? In addition, the analysis of the material revealed that commercial advertisements run during religious shows on Pakistani TV channels, but at the same time segments are also produced on a commercial basis. The main purpose of these segments, which are based on the title of religion, is to promote products.

When Posting Is Believing

Social network sites (SNS) facilitate the expression of users’ opinions to a large audience. This research aimed to investigate whether the characteristics of this new media context strengthen the adaptation of opinions to the majority and lead to an internalization of the expressed views. Based on literature on public self-presentation and identity shifts, it was assumed that the publicness of and the identifiability within SNS elicit stronger expression effects than online forums or non-public settings. A between-subjects experiment ( N = 302) varied the visible majority opinion on a news issue as well as the media context in which participants were asked to write down their opinion. Results showed significant adaptation effects to the majority (positive vs. negative comments) across media contexts. The internalization of attitudes was stronger in SNS groups with a more relevant audience but also occurred in other settings. Consequences for the formation of public opinion are discussed.