Standards for ensuring the legality of implementing unspount activities in criminal process through the prism of legal positions of the European court of human rights

The analysis of the legal positions of the ECHR in the aspect of the subject of the article under consideration made it possible to conditionally single out the following standards for ensuring the legality of the implementation of covert activity in criminal proceedings:- predictability. Its essence lies in the fact that the grounds, procedural order, conditions, timing, the circle of persons and crimes in relation to which it is allowed to carry out covert activities should be as detailed, clear and accurate as possible in the criminal procedural legislation. Moreover, any person had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the relevant regulatory prescriptions and foresee the actions that can be carried out in relation to him;- warranty against abuse. The content of this standard can be disclosed by more detailed highlighting of clarifying provisions ("substandards"). These include: control of interference in human rights and freedoms; the certainty of the circle of persons in relation to whom it is possible to carry out secret activities; limited corpus delicti, for the purpose of investigation or prevention of which covert activity is allowed;; the existence in national legislation of procedures that facilitate the law of the implementation of covert activity in criminal proceedings; the temporary nature of the implementation of secret activities in the criminal process;- verifiability. The essence of this standard can be disclosed through the establishment of judicial control over the decision of the issue regarding the possible destruction of information obtained in the course of conducting covert activities, which is not relevant to criminal proceedings, as well as the requirement for the mandatory opening of decisions that were the basis for conducting covert investigative actions;- exclusivity. The main content of this standard is that covert activity in criminal proceedings can be carried out only in cases where the disclosure or prevention of a crime in another way is impossible or is too complicated;- proportionality of the intervention and its expediency. The essence of this standard is that the implementation of certain covert coercive actions that are associated with the restriction of human rights and freedoms must be proportionate to the goals for which such actions are directed. Moreover, these goals and the applied coercion must be necessary in a democratic society;- inadmissibility of tacit interference in the communication of some subjects. First of all, this requirement concerns the need to legislatively guarantee non-interference in communication between a lawyer and his client, a priest and an accused, etc., which means a ban on targeted control over the communication of certain subjects, as well as the obligation to destroy information obtained in the course of an accidental, situational interfering with their communication.

Normatywne ujęcie czynności operacyjno-rozpoznawczych w aspekcie dowodu nielegalnego

Zagadnienia omawiane w niniejszym artykule dotyczą statusu normatywnego czynności operacyjno-rozpoznawczych w kontekście ustawy o Policji oraz kodeksu postępowania karnego. Podjęto próbę wskazania warunków, które rzutują na legalny charakter inwigilacji, a co za tym idzie – na skuteczne wykorzystanie materiału operacyjnego w procesie karnym. W tym celu scharakteryzowano niejawną aktywność Policji, wyszczególniając dopuszczalne metody operacyjne oraz definiując czynności operacyjno-rozpoznawcze w świetle literatury przedmiotu. Aby w pełni zobrazować problematykę poruszoną w artykule, przeanalizowano relację prawną między dowodem nielegalnym, o którym mowa w art. 168a kpk, a dowodem z czynności operacyjno-rozpoznawczych, na przykładzie zarządzonej kontroli operacyjnej. Praktyczny wymiar tych rozważań omówiono z punktu widzenia postępowania dowodowego, z uwzględnieniem ról i obowiązków procesowych prokuratora oraz sądu. Normative approach to operational and reconnaissance activities in terms of illegal evidence The issues discussed in this article refer to the normative status of operational and investigative activities in the context of the Police Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure. Namely, an attempt was made to demonstrate the conditions that affect the legal nature of surveillance, and thus the effective use of operational material in a criminal trial. For this purpose, the covert activity of the Police has been characterized by listing acceptable operational methods and defining operational and reconnaissance activities in the light of the literature on the subject. Therefore, in order to fully illustrate the issues discussed, an analysis was conducted of the legal relationship between the illegal evidence referred to in Art. 168a of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the evidence from operational and reconnaissance activities, on the example of an ordered operational control. The practical dimension of these considerations is discussed from the point of view of evidence proceedings, taking into account the procedural roles and responsibilities of the prosecutor and the court.

Intelligence and Belief Acquisition

Chapter one examines whether belief acquisition in intelligence a unique epistemological act. It examines the nature of intelligence analysis as an act of belief acquisition, providing a theoretical context grounded in epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature of belief and knowledge, and examining the sources of information on which intelligence analysis is based, and the mechanisms by which knowledge is gained. The chapter argues that: 1) the essential nature of intelligence is epistemological: that it is necessarily defined by the attempt to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge; 2) intelligence is necessarily a covert activity; 3) intelligence does not require unique methods of gaining knowledge and does not derive from unique sources, and; 4) the covert characteristic of intelligence means that belief acquisition in intelligence is likely to differ in the degree of epistemic complexity it faces, and that this may produce a difference in the degree to which intelligence analysis is vulnerable to cognitive bias.

Public attribution of cyber intrusions

Attribution is central to the debate on how to respond to cyber intrusions. The policy challenge is increasingly moving from identifying who is behind a cyber intrusion to finding the adequate policy response, including whether to publicly attribute. The article examines the use of public attribution as a political strategy for attaining specific political effects beyond the dyadic attacker–victim relationship, including shaping the operational and normative environment of cyber operations, with the potential to exert an independent deterrent effect. My analysis unfolds in three parts. The first part introduces two core concepts—sense-making and meaning-making—to capture different parts of the attribution process. I then introduce a theoretical understanding of public attribution drawing on the literature on revealing covert activity and argue that public attribution can serve the function of defining a particular interaction order, i.e. shape the rules of the ‘game’. In part two and three I discuss two empirical examples of both concepts. I bring to the fore three observations: First, some states have shifted their policy responses from dealing with individual cyber intrusions to responding in a broader political framework of relations with a specific adversary leading to campaign-like responses. Second, the political decision whether to attribute publicly is not only a signal to the adversary, but also aims at shaping the future political and normative operational environment. Third, such norm shaping has the potential to exert an independent—though limited—deterrent effect, particularly on potential adversaries. The analysis demonstrates the importance of the meaning-making process to understanding the politics of attribution and the rewards of theoretically integrating it into the politics of secrecy and exposure of covert activities of states.

Conclusion

This chapter begins with the ordination of Dhanam’s son and pans out to compare all three women. Aananthan is ordained in Mātāpuram, with the bishop of Meerut (Agra) presiding. The ritual offers a bottom-up view of the interdependent power relations within hegemonic orders such as the Roman Catholic Church in village India, and the Church’s relation to Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical Hindu authority. Marian possession is investigated as covert activity and agency. Meanwhile, Nancy’s marriage has tempered her possession activity and lends credence to interpretations that her possession allowed her to manipulate gender and familial roles. Rosalind’s following has grown and her family and community believe that Jecintho has consecrated the Eucharist. The many Marys of South India are compared to the Mary of the orthodox Roman Catholic Church. Final conclusions are presented, and the reader is taken to an intimate Mass in Dhanam’s natal village, presided over by her son.

Optimizing for generalization in the decoding of internally generated activity in the hippocampus

The decoding of a sensory or motor variable from neural activity benefits from a known ground truth against which decoding performance can be compared. In contrast, the decoding of covert, cognitive neural activity, such as occurs in memory recall or planning, typically cannot be compared to a known ground truth. As a result, it is unclear how decoders of such internally generated activity should be configured in practice. We suggest that if the true code for covert activity is unknown, decoders should be optimized for generalization performance using cross-validation. Using ensemble recording data from hippocampal place cells, we show that this cross-validation approach results in different decoding error, different optimal decoding parameters, and different distributions of error across the decoded variable space. In addition, we show that a minor modification to the commonly used Bayesian decoding procedure, which enables the use of spike density functions, results in substantially lower decoding errors. These results have implications for the interpretation of covert neural activity, and suggest easy-to-implement changes to commonly used procedures across domains, with applications to hippocampal place cells in particular.

Seeing is Believing: Biofeedback as a Tool to Enhance Motivation for Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) as applied by behavioral scientists includes strategies for changing negative cognitions that contribute to depression and anxiety. Biofeedback is a useful strategy to demonstrate to clients the mind (cognitive, psychological) to body (physiological) interaction. For example, a cognitive, psychological reaction to a stimuli results in a physiological effects as illustrated by changes in skin conductance or muscle tension. A case example is used to demonstrate an anticipatory psychophysiological response resulting in covert activity of the forearm as a client simply imagines playing the piano.

Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War

States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.