Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, by Jennifer Carlson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 248 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780199347551. It is easier for an average citizen in Dodge City or Tombstone to carry a concealed firearm in public today than it was in the nineteenth century, the heyday of the "Wild West." The expansion of "shall issue" concealed carry laws in the United States over the past three decades represents the greatest liberalization of gun laws in the nation's history. Consequently, many more ordinary citizens are legally permitted to carry firearms for self-defense in public. Reasonable estimates suggest 8 to 12 million Americans have permits to carry concealed weapons nationally, with over 10 percent of the population licensed to carry in some states. Jennifer Carlson calls this a "gun carry revolution," and she is right. And yet sociologists have been oddly silent about it. Carlson steps into this void with a case study of individuals who legally carry guns, either openly or concealed, in southeastern Michigan. In addition to interviews with 60 mostly white, middle-aged male gun carriers, Carlson did 150 hours of participant observation at shooting ranges, activist events, and gun training classes. In the process she also obtained a concealed carry license, carried a gun during her fieldwork, and became a National Rifle Association (NRA) certified firearms instructor. In the best tradition of ethnography, Carlson is a critical observer analyzing this aspect of American gun culture from the inside out. Carlson begins Citizen-Protectors with the stories of two individuals that illustrate the complex race, class, gender, and other social dynamics that influence gun carry. The first involves Corey, a white clerk at a corner store in Flint, who shoots and kills a black man in self-defense during … Language: en

Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline

Background: Cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a prominent concern among healthcare providers in adopting digital technologies for improving the quality of care delivered to patients. The recent reports on cyber attacks, such as ransomware and WannaCry, have brought to life the destructive nature of such attacks upon healthcare. In complement to cyberattacks, which have been targeted against the vulnerabilities of information technology (IT) infrastructures, a new form of cyber attack aims to exploit human vulnerabilities; such attacks are categorised as social engineering attacks. Following an increase in the frequency and ingenuity of attacks launched against hospitals and clinical environments with the intention of causing service disruption, there is a strong need to study the level of awareness programmes and training activities offered to the staff by healthcare organisations. Objective: The objective of this systematic review is to identify commonly encountered factors that cybersecurity postures of a healthcare organisation, resulting from the ignorance of cyber threat to healthcare. The systematic review aims to consolidate the current literature being reported upon human behaviour resulting in security gaps that mitigate the cyber defence strategy adopted by healthcare organisations. Additionally, the paper also reviews the organisational risk assessment methodology implemented and the policies being adopted to strengthen cybersecurity. Methods: The topic of cybersecurity within healthcare and the clinical environment has attracted the interest of several researchers, resulting in a broad range of literature. The inclusion criteria for the articles in the review stem from the scope of the five research questions identified. To this end, we conducted seven search queries across three repositories, namely (i) PubMed®/MED-LINE; (ii) Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL); and (iii) Web of Science (WoS), using key words related to cybersecurity awareness, training, organisation risk assessment methodologies, policies and recommendations adopted as counter measures within health care. These were restricted to around the last 12 years. Results: A total of 70 articles were selected to be included in the review, which addresses the complexity of cybersecurity measures adopted within the healthcare and clinical environments. The articles included in the review highlight the evolving nature of cybersecurity threats stemming from exploiting IT infrastructures to more advanced attacks launched with the intent of exploiting human vulnerability. A steady increase in the literature on the threat of phishing attacks evidences the growing threat of social engineering attacks. As a countermeasure, through the review, we identified articles that provide methodologies resulting from case studies to promote cybersecurity awareness among stakeholders. The articles included highlight the need to adopt cyber hygiene practices among healthcare professionals while accessing social media platforms, which forms an ideal test bed for the attackers to gain insight into the life of healthcare professionals. Additionally, the review also includes articles that present strategies adopted by healthcare organisations in countering the impact of social engineering attacks. The evaluation of the cybersecurity risk assessment of an organisation is another key area of study reported in the literature that recommends the organisation of European and international standards in countering social engineering attacks. Lastly, the review includes articles reporting on national case studies with an overview of the economic and societal impact of service disruptions encountered due to cyberattacks. Discussion: One of the limitations of the review is the subjective ranking of the authors associated to the relevance of literature to each of the research questions identified. We also acknowledge the limited amount of literature that focuses on human factors of cybersecurity in health care in general; therefore, the search queries were formulated using well-established cybersecurity related topics categorised according to the threats, risk assessment and organisational strategies reported in the literature.

Influence of Human Factors on Cyber Security within Healthcare Organisations: A Systematic Review.

Information security has been an area of research and teaching within various computing disciplines in higher education almost since the beginnings of modern computers. The need for security in computing curricula has steadily grown over this period. Recently, with an emerging global crisis, because of the limitations of security within the nascent information technology infrastructure, the field of "cybersecurity" is emerging with international interest and support. Recent evolution of cybersecurity shows that it has begun to take shape as a true academic perspective, as opposed to simply being a training domain for certain specialized jobs. This report starts from the premise that cybersecurity is a "meta-discipline." That is, cybersecurity is used as an aggregate label for a wide variety of similar disciplines, much in the same way that the terms "engineering" and "computing" are commonly used. Thus, cybersecurity should be formally interpreted as a meta-discipline with a variety of disciplinary variants, also characterized through a generic competency model. The intention is that this simple organizational concept will improve the clarity with which the field matures, resulting in improved standards and goals for many different types of cybersecurity programs.

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Global perspectives on cybersecurity education for 2030: a case for a meta-discipline

Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America

A framework for competence development and assessment in hybrid cybersecurity exercises

One of the challenges in writing an article reviewing the current state of cyber education and workforce development is that there is a paucity of quantitative assessment regarding the cognitive aptitudes, work roles, or team organization required by cybersecurity professionals to be successful. In this review, we argue that the people who operate within the cyber domain need a combination of technical skills, domain specific knowledge, and social intelligence to be successful. They, like the networks they operate, must also be reliable, trustworthy, and resilient. Defining the knowledge, skills, attributes and other characteristics is not as simple as defining a group of technical skills that people can be trained on; the complexity of the cyber domain makes this a unique challenge. There has been little research devoted to exactly what attributes individuals in the cyber domain need. What research does exist places an emphasis on technical and engineering skills while discounting the important social and organizational influences that dictate success or failure in everyday settings. This paper reviews the literature on cyber expertise and cyber workforce development to identify gaps and then argues for the important contribution of social fit in the highly-complex and heterogenous cyber workforce. We then identify six assumptions for the future of cybersecurity workforce development, including the requirement for systemic thinkers, team players, a love for continued learning, strong communication ability, a sense of civic duty, and a blend of technical and social skill. Finally, we make recommendations for social and cognitive metrics which may be indicative of future performance in cyber work roles to provide a roadmap for future scholars.

The Future Cybersecurity Workforce: Going Beyond Technical Skills for Successful Cyber Performance.

Understanding the deep meaning of the Second Amendment is critical to understanding American gun culture. The centrality of the Second Amendment in American culture can be better understood through the intersection of American nationalism with Protestant Christianity. This paper argues that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has capitalized on the religious nationalism that arose in the late 1970s alongside the Moral Majority and has increasingly used religious language to shape the discourse surrounding the Second Amendment. Understanding the transformation of the Second Amendment from an important Constitutional amendment to an article of faith in religious nationalism provides new insight about the meaning of guns for American identity. The use of religious rhetoric, such as references to evil combined with references to civic obligation, illustrates the merging of American civic religion with the New Christian Right’s rhetoric. Using issues of the American Rifleman to investigate the changing discourse since the mid-1970s, this paper demonstrates how the NRA increased its use of religious language to frame the political debate about gun rights through a religious nationalist lens.

/pdf/shall-not-be-infringed-how-the-nra-used-religious-language-4es5nrou87.pdf

Shall not be infringed: how the NRA used religious language to transform the meaning of the Second Amendment

This paper presents a case study of how a fringe idea moves into the cultural mainstream. In its cultural and political project to defend the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) embraced New War culture, a counter-cultural response to the trauma of the war in Vietnam, which extended warrior honor to armed men defending their families from an increasingly hostile world and a suspect government that might try to disarm them. Using textual analysis of the American Rifleman, we explore how the NRA co-opted narratives of soldiers' sacrifice for the nation to promote a New War cultural message. We find that magazine contributors retooled the traditional narrative to feature non-military protagonists, to differentiate the nation from the government, and to spotlight freedom as a sacrificial cause. With their strong civil religious overtones, the NRA's sacrifice narratives served as value-laden signposts that elevated the Second Amendment to a sacred God-given freedom, extended the consecration from sacrifice to encompass their mainstream audience of gun owners, and identified political and cultural enemies. These classic American narratives of soldiers’ sacrifice for the nation were thus co-opted to deliver a simultaneously patriotic and anti-government counter-cultural message that would resonate with mainstream American culture.

These honored dead: sacrifice narratives in the NRA’s American Rifleman Magazine

Since 2016, Russia has engaged in a dedicated influence operation against the United States to exacerbate existing cleavages in American society and to undermine US national security. Although distinctly modern in its use of social media platforms, the current methods align with old Soviet doctrine using information warfare to gain a strategic edge over competitors. We examine Russia’s use of military-related content and profiles in their influence operation on Twitter and, in particular, the strategic deployment of military narratives. Using data from Twitter’s comprehensive data archive of state-backed information operations, we find that 12.14% of the 1,408,712 tweets in English from 2009 through February 2021 contain military-related content. In addition, of the 2,370 fake accounts on Twitter tied to the IRA and GRU, 148 were from accounts posing as military or military-adjacent, and these accounts posted 12.7% of the influence operation’s tweets. Together, tweets containing military-related content or coming from fake military and military-adjacent profiles account for 22.6% of the tweets identified as part of the Russian influence operation on Twitter. The Russians used narratives related to veterans, particularly sacrifice narratives and post-Vietnam government betrayal of sacrifice narratives. Patriotic sacrifice narratives were used to gather and engage an audience and to legitimize and amplify the content and accounts. In contrast, betrayal of sacrifice narratives were weaponized to amplify and escalate divisive social issues by tying them to veterans’ sacrifices. We conclude the Russians amplified existing military narratives in American culture and used fake American military profiles to wrap anti-government sentiment in patriotic trappings to exacerbate existing social divisions. Turning Americans against their government achieves Russian strategic goals of removing American influence abroad and allowing Russia to have greater impact on the levers of international power that serve Russian interests.

https://papers.academic-conferences.org/index.php/iccws/article/download/985/982

How the Russian Influence Operation on Twitter Weaponized Military Narratives

In an era of digital surveillance, data profiteering companies have created a surveillance-based economy that uses algorithms to target messages and content that increase social divisions and inequality. This economic model poses an existential threat to democracy and social stability not only because of the amplification but because these algorithms are embedded in social cultural context. The emergence of cheap computing and massive—largely invisible—data collection in every aspect of daily life has enabled the creation of massive amounts of data on individuals that can be merged and enriched and aggregated. These data can determine outcomes such as what homes buyers are shown or whether they are approved to purchase a home, whether travelers are added to the no-fly list or patients receive lifesaving medical treatment, or what price one pays for a service or is even allowed to access a service—all based on commercial data collection. Given existing and entrenched systems of social inequality, the questions of what gets encoded into data, who controls it, and who has access to it, are key existential questions facing sociology in the coming century and hold the potential to dramatically remake every aspect of society. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/socf.12907

Jessica Dawson

Papers

The Future Cybersecurity Workforce: Going Beyond Technical Skills for Successful Cyber Performance.

Shall not be infringed: how the NRA used religious language to transform the meaning of the Second Amendment

These honored dead: sacrifice narratives in the NRA’s American Rifleman Magazine

How the Russian Influence Operation on Twitter Weaponized Military Narratives

Who Controls the Code, Controls the System: Algorithmically Amplified Bullshit, Social Inequality, and the Ubiquitous Surveillance of Everyday Life