Current Research Projects:
Companies and Combat Operations: Regulating Private Military Companies
After the War on Terror
The
privatization of warfare has led to increasing state reliance on private
military companies (PMCs) in the conduct of security operations. The prominence of the participation of these
companies in the War on Terror led to widespread reports of PMC human rights
violations. CACI International and Titan
Corporation were at the center of the torture scandal involving detainees at Abu
Ghraib, while Blackwater made headlines following the 2007, Nisour Square killing
of seventeen Iraqi civilians. These
breaches of international humanitarian law promoted calls for increased
international regulation of this industry.
Central to understanding how best to regulate the actions of these
companies is the differentiation between PMCs and the mercenaries of the
past. While mercenaries operated as
private individuals, PMCs are highly organized corporate structures. As such, this study applies the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights to the debate concerning how best to
regulate PMC involvement in military operations. Specifically, it examines John
Ruggie’s “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, whereby states indicate the
best practices these companies must adhere to when participating in military
operations, as a tool for preventing PMC human rights abuses in conflict
situations.
The Big Data Era 'Minority Report' Approach to Intelligence: Predictive Analytics and Challenges to U.S. Privacy Law
The
Intelligence Community has publicly identified big data analytic techniques as
central to its technology strategy. The
democratization of this concept and advances in big data analytics have allowed
the IC to strengthen its capability to both distill and relate information more
effectively, and offer the promise of delivering better intelligence at a lower
cost. However, developments in big data
analysis have outpaced the existing legal frameworks governing the protection
of personal privacy rights. The movie, Minority Report, envisions a world in
which pre-crime prediction is so effective that law enforcement agents arrest
individuals before any crimes have been committed. While this fictionalized account of
predictive analysis presents an especially dark view of the future, there are
significant legal implications stemming from the advent of the big data era
that warrant further discussion. This
paper examines the legal challenges inherent in the use of big data generated
by predictive intelligence models.
Following United States v. Jones,
the paper assesses possible Fourth Amendment privacy harms resulting from the use
of big data analytics in intelligence cases.
It further addresses the need to re-define the concept of “personally
identifiable information” (PII) in order to balance the benefits of predictive
analysis with potential privacy harms.
Beyond the Citizen Corps - Civilian Participation in U.S. Homeland Security Operations
This project examines the role of civilian volunteer groups in U.S. Homeland Security Operations in the post-9/11 period.
