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This is not simply a failure to achieve perfection or a matter of a few percentage points; it is the rule, rather than the exception. Among dozens of surveys, from security vendors, industry analysts and government agencies, we have not found one that appears free of this upward bias. As a result, we have very little idea of the size of cybercrime losses.
"Experts in cyber law told TPM that Twitter’s stance in Harris’ case was undeniably important and could prove to be a landmark one for user privacy and law enforcement’s ability to access user information going forward."
"For most of the 20th century, prisoners' stays in solitary confinement were relatively short. "People would get thrown in 'the hole' for a couple days at a time, maybe a couple weeks at a time," says Craig Haney, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research has explored the psychological effects of incarceration.
That's changed over the last two decades or so. "Now they're in the hole for years at a time," he says. Over the last 20 years, so-called "supermax" prisons have become increasingly popular. There, tens of thousands of inmates spend years locked in small cells for 23 to 24 hours a day.."
"But despite the inherent unreliability of lie detectors, they have recently seen a rebirth."
"The results of this study indicate that Americans tend to view crime through a racial lens. Because of this, crime is often associated with “others” — usually poor people of color. It is this “other” status that keeps many Americans from identifying with and having empathy for those caught up in the criminal justice system. This lack of “empathic identification” contributes to Americans’ support for punitive criminal justice policies."
Comments on 2012 supreme court decision authorizing strip searches after any arrest.
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Given that the court accepted that the police have a right to strip search and arrested citizens even without probable cause, it would seem sensible to think that they will rule in favor of the Affordable Care Act. After all, if the state has the right to strip you naked and check out your junk when you are arrested for anything at all, then surely the state has the power to require you to buy health care insurance. In fact, given that an increased number of Americans will be exposed to the chilliness and psychological stress of being strip searched, they will need health insurance more than ever.
"Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie"
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In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgment about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement, with the role of victim played by an actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgments by assumptions about the victim's demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair.
In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. There is, unsurprisingly, no universal reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.
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Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person. When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight".
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"The idea was that penitentiaries would heal the criminally ill just as hospitals cured the physically sick. It didn’t work. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — the failures of the first prisons, states authorized more and larger prisons. With flogging banned and crime not cured, there was simply no alternative. We tried rehabilitation and ended up with supermax. We tried to be humane and ended up with more prisoners than Stalin had at the height of the Soviet Gulag. Somewhere in the process, we lost the concept of justice and punishment in a free society.
Today, the prison-industrial complex has become little more than a massive government-run make-work program that profits from human bondage. To oversimplify — just a bit — we pay poor, unemployed rural whites to guard poor, unemployed urban blacks.
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"Ripper books can be either atrocious or endlessly fascinating. There is no in-between. "
"Official government violence against nonviolent Americans and residents, by contrast, occurs daily. And for the last 30 years it has been increasing at an alarming rate. From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska conducted an annual survey on the use of SWAT teams in the United States. Until the late 1970s, SWAT teams were generally used in emergency situations to defuse conflicts with people who presented an immediate threat to others, such as hostage takers, bank robbers, or mass shooters. But beginning in the early 1980s, police departments across the country began using SWAT teams to serve drug warrants.
Kraska found that the number of SWAT deployments in America increased from 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s. That’s about 135 SWAT raids per day. The vast majority of those are for drug warrants."
The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property - which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional - when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice - this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.
"When Americans begin routinely complaining about how they hate their government and don't trust their leaders, it may be time to look warily at the homicide rate."
"Dr Steve Hall and Dr Craig McLean, claim in the latest international journal Theoretical Criminology that homicide rates are significantly higher in nations in neo-liberal politics where free market forces are allowed free rein, such as the USA, but are significantly lower in nations governed by social-democratic policies which still characterise most Western European nations."
So when levies break and a city floods and no one with the authority to help comes to the aid of those trapped by the rising waters, we can't bear the idea that something just like that could happen just as suddenly to us. We decide that they, like Job, must have done something to bring this on themselves. We make up stories about violent looting mobs -- opportunists who chose to stay behind and whose fearsome ruthlessness prevents the sending of aid.
Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
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