A Rational Choice Reflection on the Balance Among Individual Rights, Collective Security, and Threat Portrayals between 9/11 and the Invasion of Iraq

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Bejesky
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Lepsius

Just one day after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the German minister of the interior, Otto Schily (SPD), demanded a new security concept. Immediately the existing security laws and precautions were placed under special scrutiny in search for any sorts of deficiencies. The results of these reviews were two legislative initiatives, termed “security packages” or “anti-terror packages,” which changed or altered numerous existing statutes. The new security laws contain a number of infringements into fundamental civil rights and liberties. The legislative process thus had to raise the issue of the relationship between security and civil liberties and weigh the balance between the protection of individual rights and collective security. This, however, does not constitute a new challenge for the German legislature. The collision of security interests with individual civil liberties has caused a legal problem in Germany for some time. September 11 might constitute a political watershed, but in the context of civil liberties in Germany, this date does not represent an important mark. The current measures have to be understood within the context of an at least thirty-year-long period of continuous weighing between security and freedom.


OUGHTOPIA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-282
Author(s):  
In-Kyun Kim ◽  
Myeong-Geon Koh

In automated control systems for technical processes, the conversion of a continuous signal into a digital code and vice versa from a digital code to a continuous (analog) value is widely used. For direct type converters often used the term ADC, the reverse - DAC. The characteristics of the converters often dramatically affect the parameters of the entire automated system. The importance of the correct choice of ADCs and DACs has especially increased recently in connection with the mass introduction of microcontrollers MC. Indeed, in addition to the ADC and DAC, it is necessary to place the processor core in the microcontroller's crystal, I/O interfaces and many other elements necessary for the functioning of the MC. The use of information converters in the construction industry imposes additional requirements on converters: for example, in building monitoring systems, precision ADCs with extremely high accuracy are often required (while performance may be low), in other applications it is necessary to provide the necessary parameters at a high level of industrial interference, etc. This article explores issues related to the rational choice of ADCs and DACs, taking into account current trends in the IT field and the specifics of work in the construction industry. Sigma-Delta converters are noted as the most promising models of direct type converters.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Harper

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.


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