Organised crime in ports and the isps code: where to now?

In a previous Strategic Insights article [issue no.31, March 2011]  there was a focus on increasing use of maritime shipping containers by drug traffickers pointing to their use as a transport method. This raised the quetion of the extent to which counterterrorism efforts that have raised security levels in ports, as part of a general heightening of security levels. This article questions whether current counterterrorism arrangements on the landside of ports can be effective tools against the presence of organised crime.

The constitutional rights of children and the Prevention of Organised Crime Act 121 of 1998

The Prevention of Organised Crime Act 121 of 1998 [POCA] embodies a serious attempt by the South African government to effectively police and curb organised crime, money laundering and criminal gang activities in South Africa. The Act provides inter alia for a range of crippling fines and for orders such as confiscation and forfeiture. Asset forfeiture and confiscation orders can affect the rights of third parties directly and indirectly in a number of ways. Young persons and children can beaffected indirectly because asset forfeiture and confiscation orders may violate the right to parental care of the dependent young persons and children of the person who is subject to the order. This brief article will investigate aspects of the protection afforded to the rights of children when such orders are made in terms of the provisions of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.

Implementing FATF standards in developing countries and financial inclusion : findings and guidelines

This report, emanating from a project commissioned by the FIRST Initiative, considers the impact of the implementation of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) controls on financial inclusion in five countries (Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and South Africa). Based on these findings, it develops a set of guidelines to assist the authorities in developing countries to design effective AML/CFT regimes that are compliant with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards and supports financial inclusion.
The report and guidelines will be of benefit to countries striving towards the dual goals of protecting their institutions against money laundering and the financing of terrorism as well as extending financial inclusion, irrespective of whether protective measures are being considered in the process of implementing or amending AML/CFT controls to meet the Forty Nine Recommendations of the FATF or in order to meet other, related international requirements, such as those set out in the 2000 United Nations Convention on Transnational Organised Crime or the 2003 United Nations Convention Against Corruption.
The project was supervised and guided by a steering committee consisting of representatives from the FIRST Management Unit, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the South African National Treasury, the FinMark Trust and Professor Nikos Passas, an acknowledged world expert on AML/CFT standards and implementation.

Fictions for representing and generating semiotic consciousness: the crime story and educational inquiry

This essay appraises the work of fiction in representing and generating semiotic consciousness in education by examining three intertextual continuities between crime fiction and stories of educational inquiry. First, many reports of educational research resemble detective stories in their quests to determine the (or a) “truth” about something that is problematic or puzzling and this essay describes some of the ways in which the characteristic investigatory methods of fictional detectives resemble forms of educational inquiry. Second, the characteristic ways in which detective stories generate interpretations are compared with the textual strategies deployed in producing meanings and narratives in educational inquiry. Third, recent transformations of both detective fiction and educational inquiry are shown to be comparable — and intertextually linked — manifestations of cultural and semiotic shifts associated with postmodernity. I conclude by suggesting that authors of “anti-detective” crime fiction might provide more appropriate models of educational inquiry than do fictional detectives.

Crime stories: posnerian pragmatism, Rawlsian pure procedural justice, and the fictional problem

There are many different ways in which law and truth may be said to be related. It is perhaps in the criminal trial that connections between them are of most significance. An orthodox way of describing a criminal trial is that the criminal procedure is seeking to establish the truth concerning some past event, and that success of the procedure is measured by how close its outcome converges with that truth. Criminal justice presents the community with challenging dilemmas in this regard, such as those arising from the notion of double jeopardy. This paper discusses the Rawlsian notions of 'imperfect', 'perfect' and 'pure' procedural justice, and suggests against Rawls that it is pure procedural justice that best represents what we want from a criminal justice system. Good procedure makes good criminal law. A comparison is made with the writings of Habermas and Posner, and given that pure procedural justice eschews transcendental truths, some brief comments are made on the convergence of that position with the realm of the fictional.

A note on psychoanalysis and the crime of torture

Torture and the legitimate powers of the state - why are psychoanalysts involved - torture can be seen as an information gathering device - psychoanalysis may play a role in the creation of information gathering coercion techniques.

Information security, cyber crime, and infrastructure protection : information security management within Australian healthcare organisations

Information security is now recognised as critical factor within the healthcare industry. With the gradual move from paper -based to electronic information there is an even greater need for protection. However, financial and operational constraints often exist which influence the practicality of developing a secure system. A new baseline security standard, the Health Information Security Management Implementation Guide, has been drafted which applies specifically to the unique information security requirements of the healthcare industry. The aim of this paper is to look at the effectiveness of the health information security standard and the development of information security within the Australian healthcare industry.

Shaming, shame and recidivism : a test of reintegrative shaming theory in the white-collar crime context

Despite the popularity of reintegrative shaming theory in the field of criminology, only a small number of studies purporting to test it have been published to date. The aim of the present study, therefore, is to provide an empirical test of Braithwaite's (1989; Braithwaite and Braithwaite 2001) theory of reintegrative shaming in the white-collar crime context. The data on which the study is based came from survey data collected from a group of 652 tax offenders. Consistent with predictions, it was found that feelings of reintegration/stigmatization experienced during an enforcement event were related to reoffending behaviour. Those taxpayers who felt that their enforcement experience had been reintegrative in nature were less likely to report having evaded their taxes two years later. Consistent with Braithwaite and Braithwaite's (2001) hypotheses, shame-related emotions were also found to partially mediate the effect of reintegration on subsequent offending behaviour. Implications for the effective regulation of white-collar offenders are discussed.

Mental health promotion and socio-economic disadvantage: lessons from substance abuse, violence and crime prevention and child health

Issue addressed: Mental health promotion aimed at populations with low socio-economic status (SES) may benefit by investigating prevention strategies that effectively address related child and adolescent problems.
Methods: Evidence from a number of literature reviews and program evaluations was synthesised. First, the impact of SES on development from childhood to adulthood is considered in light of research on substance
abuse, violence, crime, and child development problems. Second, evaluations of interventions are reviewed to identify those that have shown outcomes in research studies (efficacy) or in real-world settings (effectiveness) in reducing developmental problems associated with low SES. Low SES is measured in different ways including low levels of education and/or income or definitions that combine several variables into a new indicator of low SES.
Results: Factors associated with low SES are also associated to varying extent with the development of violence and crime, substance abuse and child health problems. Interventions that address underlying determinants of low SES show strong efficacy in decreasing adolescent crime and violence and effectiveness in improving child health outcomes. Although there is limited efficacy evidence that substance abuse prevention can be effectively addressed by targeting low SES, programs designed to improve educational pathways show some efficacy in reducing aspects of adolescent substance use.
Conclusion: Mental health promotion strategies can draw on the approaches outlined here that are associated with the prevention of child and adolescent problems within low SES communities. Alternatively, such interventions could be supported in mental health promotion policy as they may assist in preventing related problems that undermine mental health.

Adaptive communal detection in search of adversarial identity crime

This paper is on adaptive real-time searching of credit application data streams for identity crime with many search parameters. Specifically, we concentrated on handling our domain-specific adversarial activity problem with the adaptive Communal Analysis Suspicion Scoring (CASS) algorithm. CASS's main novel theoretical contribution is in the formulation of State-of- Alert (SoA) which sets the condition of reduced, same, or heightened watchfulness; and Parameter-of-Change (PoC) which improves detection ability with pre-defined parameter values for each SoA. With pre-configured SoA policy and PoC strategy, CASS determines when, what, and how much to adapt its search parameters to ongoing adversarial activity. The above approach is validated with three sets of experiments, where each experiment is conducted on several million real credit applications and measured with three appropriate performance metrics. Significant improvements are achieved over previous work, with the discovery of some practical insights of adaptivity into our domain.

Cyber crime influencing businesses in South Africa

This study shows that cyber crime is a recent addition to the list of crimes that can adversely affec tbusinesses directly or indirectly. This phenomenon was not directly prosecutable in South Africa until the enactment of the ECT Act in July 2002. However this Act also prevents businesses to fully prosecute a hacker due to incompleteness. Any kind of commercially related crime can be duplicated as cyber crime. Therefore very little research appears or has been documented about cyber crime in South African companies before 2003. The motivation to do this study was
that businesses often loose millions in cyber attacks, not necessarily through direct theft but by the loss of service and damage to the image of the company. Most of the companies that were approached for interviews on cyber crime were reluctant to share the fact that they were hacked
or that cyber crime occurred at their company as it violates their security policies and may expose their fragile security platforms.
The purpose of this study was to attempt to get an overall view on how South African businesses are affected by cyber crime in the banking and short term insurance sector of the South African industry and also to determine what legislation exist in this country to protect them.
The case study approach was used to determine the affect of cyber crime on businesses like banks and insurance companies and higher education institutions. Each case was interviewed, monitored and was observed over a period of a year. This study discloses the evaluation of the results of how cyber crime affected the cases, which were part of this study. The banks and higher education institutions felt that they were at an increased risk both externally and internally, which is likely to increase as the migration towards electronic commerce occurs. The insurance industry felt that they are not yet affected by external cyber crime attacks in this country.