Journal articles on the topic 'Internet banking Security measures Australia'

The internet brought a new revolution to the financial sector and it has changed the way of operations in the last two decades. Now, people have the option to carry out banking transactions from a place of their choice without having to go to a nearby bank office. E-banking has become an integral part of the banking system and has become a popular method of transaction for the majority of people. A user has a wide range of options for managing his money through numerous internet banking methods. While internet banking is an aid for customers, they still have to be vigilant to keep their accounts safe from cybercriminals and hackers, as everything on the internet is prone to security threats. Internet security measures followed by the majority of the bank sites to protect their information are not up-to-date as compared to the dynamic cyber threats. Such problems have made it easy for confidential financial information to fall into the hands of third parties and cybercriminals. Although there are several security measures to stop data breaches, there are still flaws in these systems. The goal of this study article is to look at the number of cyber security issues in internet banking in India and the consumer’s awareness of these issues and preventive measures used by them. Our research is particularly based on primary data.

This paper examines the users’ perspective on the security of Internet banking in Australia within the social context. This user-centered design approach supplements the technological and industrial approaches to security. The user-centered research on banking was conducted at the Royal Melbourne University of Technology University and Griffith University, both of which are part of the Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre. We conclude that the most effective way to increase the perception of Internet banking security is to increase ease of use, convenience, personalisation and trust. Without the perception of security, there will be little trust in banking and transactions on the Internet. This will impede the use of Internet banking and e-commerce which are increasingly important aspects of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

Internet banking is getting more popular with the increasing number and demand of online banking customers. Almost all transactions that could be performed in bank branches could also be realized through internet banking. Internet banking, which has become widespread with the increasing use of the Internet, has also led to an increase in cases of financial fraud. This has made the protection of personal data and the security of banking services more important than ever. It is very important for institutions and organizations providing online banking services to take security measures in their systems. Cybercriminals target internet users with methods such as malware infection, botnets, spam, phishing, identity theft, and social engineering that they use and develop every day. Therefore, there are always potential risks in using internet banking. Banking viruses commonly used by cybercriminals today are TrickBot and Emotet. Nowadays TrickBot and Emotet are popular banking trojans which gives hard times for online banking customers. Their primary goal is to steal user’s banking and personal information. In this study, we will investigate the behavior analysis and new tricks of TrickBot and Emotet banking viruses, which use different methods to compromise the security of online banking customers. We benefited WEKA program to detect these banking viruses. In addition to this, we also focused on the detection of TrickBot and Emotet Banking viruses with using Random Tree, J48, Naive Bayes, SMO Techniques.

AbstractPurpose: This paper aims to analyze the level of disclosure of information about Internet Banking security on bank websites, as well as its determinants.Methodology: The analysis of the disclosure level was based on a framework consisting of 25 items divided into physical, administrative and technical measures. We adopted quantitative (descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis) and qualitative (content analysis) approaches for data analysis.Originality / Value: Considering that security is one of the main determinants of Internet Banking adoption, this study aims to expand the discussion on banking services and information security, focusing on a topic that has still been little explored in the Brazilian scenario.Findings: The main results showed that the level of security information disclosed by banks on their websites is low. Banks with a greater number of branches, with higher profitability and private banks showed better levels of disclosure.Theoretical / methodological contributions: At the theoretical level, the study brings contributions to the literature by addressing a topic that has been little explored, especially in Brazil. In addition, this research addresses this issue considering both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, which allows a greater detail on the items to be considered by financial institutions when offering electronic services to their customers.Managerial implications: The results of the study may help banks to assess and improve the level of information being disclosed to their customers in order to increase consumer trust in Internet Banking and, consequently, the diffusion of this technology.

Mobile devices such as Smart Phones and Personal Assistant Devices (PDA) that are Internet based are becoming much more capable of handling complex tasks such as online shopping, online banking as well as social media networking; However, the security mechanisms and defense measures that are built into those devices are not commensurate with those powerful communication and computational capabilities. This in turn, creates critical vulnerabilities thus promoting the chance for imminent security threats. The intent of this paper is to take a look into some of the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of smart phones that are Internet based, explore the current security mechanisms and strategies that are in place, and finally propose some proactive defense strategies to ensure appropriate protection of critical information contained in Smart phone devices.

This study examines the use of the Internet for business purposes in Yemen, where main sectors of banking and private trade organizations are observed. Through interviews, a thorough study is performed concerning the Internet facilities available in Yemen, the literacy and use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in organizations, the level of e-commerce adopted, the main hurdles in the adoption of e-commerce, and measures required to increase the adoption of e-commerce. The study finds that both organizations realize the importance of e-commerce for their business. The main causes in the delay of e-commerce adoption by some are the discrepancies in the infrastructure, high costing of the Internet facilities, bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining the facilities, and the non-availability of a secure environment. Beyond concerns about Internet security, their awareness of security hazards and protection measures is minimal. In light of the data collected, the study has come up with certain recommendations for the interested authorities to improve e-commerce in Yemen.

Purpose – This study aims to determine the effects of service quality dimensions on customer satisfaction in Pakistan by using the SERVQUAL model. Design/methodology/approach – A survey research questionnaire of 30 items has been adopted, and the data of 400 respondents were collected from the users of Internet banking of different banks located in Karachi city of Pakistan. Findings – The reliability analysis shows that all dimensions are reliable. Results of the factor analysis confirm the grouping of adopted questioner. At last, the regression analysis indicates a significant positive relationship between assurance, tangibility, reliability and responsiveness with customer satisfaction. Conversely, empathy shows a positive but insignificant effect on the customer satisfaction. Practical implications – It is recommended that the management of online banks has to focus on making the design and content of the Web sites more visually appealing to grab the attention of existing customers, as well as to attract new customers. The management has to take effective measures to further enhance the security and safety of online bank accounts, so that customers can maintain long-term relationships with the usage of online banking. Online banks have to provide more reliable services to the customers at heart to make the customers more comfortable and confident. The management should develop more effective systems to quickly solve the issues of customers. Originality/value – This paper makes a unique contribution to the literature with reference to Pakistan, being a pioneering attempt to investigate the customer satisfaction in the banking industry of Pakistan by using a large sample and advance statistical techniques.

Encryption is one of the measures that ensure the security of images used in various fields such as military understanding, secure clinical imaging offices, Internet and intranet media, electronic banking, and individual association images such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. On this huge number of images that are sent in a free and open link either during selection or messaging; Then their security ends up being a central need in individual insurance organizations and the arrangement. This article audits and summarizes various image encryption systems to further develop advanced image encryption strategies that operate with expanded flexibility and security.

As smart devices have become commonly used to access internet banking applications, these devices constitute appealing targets for fraudsters. Impersonation attacks are an essential concern for internet banking providers. Therefore, user authentication countermeasures based on biometrics, whether physiological or behavioral, have been developed, including those based on touch dynamics biometrics. These measures take into account the unique behavior of a person when interacting with touchscreen devices, thus hindering identitification fraud because it is hard to impersonate natural user behaviors. Behavioral biometric measures also balance security and usability because they are important for human interfaces, thus requiring a measurement process that may be transparent to the user. This paper proposes an improvement to Biotouch, a supervised Machine Learning-based framework for continuous user authentication. The contributions of the proposal comprise the utilization of multiple scopes to create more resilient reasoning models and their respective datasets for the improved Biotouch framework. Another contribution highlighted is the testing of these models to evaluate the imposter False Acceptance Error (FAR). This proposal also improves the flow of data and computation within the improved framework. An evaluation of the multiple scope model proposed provides results between 90.68% and 97.05% for the harmonic mean between recall and precision (F1 Score). The percentages of unduly authenticated imposters and errors of legitimate user rejection (Equal Error Rate (EER)) are between 9.85% and 1.88% for static verification, login, user dynamics, and post-login. These results indicate the feasibility of the continuous multiple-scope authentication framework proposed as an effective layer of security for banking applications, eventually operating jointly with conventional measures such as password-based authentication.

Governments and telecommunications companies have invested heavily in measures designed to protect overall system security. But these measures may not be enough if China is successful in setting the rules and designing the architecture of a new internet, because the one-party state’s internet vision reflects authoritarian values that are diametrically opposed to ours. China has suggested a radical change to the way the internet functions to the International Telecommunications Union. This would bake authoritarianism into the architecture underpinning the web, giving state-run internet service providers granular control over citizens’ use. The authoritarian state’s ability to monitor and control undersea fibre optic cables is emerging as a major national security issue for Australia and other democracies. The world could split into two separate information worlds, one led by the US and the other by China. A Balkanised internet is not in Australia’s interest. We must engage with friends and allies to come up with a fit-for-purpose world wide web that is more efficient, secure, user friendly and compatible with democracy.

Abstract: Increased protection of resource-constrained devices, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, is in high demand these days. For high-resource desktop PCs, current encryption techniques are sufficient. Access control systems, transaction banking systems, and payment systems are all examples of high-security applications where RFID technology are used. The attacker tries to deceive RFIDs in order to gain illegal access to services without paying for them or to get around security measures by detecting a secret password. The most difficult problem with RFID systems is ensuring effective protection against such infringements. For RFID systems, lightweight cryptography can give security assurance. SLIM is a novel ultralightweight cryptography technique for RFID devices presented in this paper. Since block ciphers are the most commonly used cryptographic and provide highly strong protection for IoT devices, SLIM is a 32-bit block cipher based on the Feistel structure. The most difficult aspect of creating a lightweight block cipher is balancing performance, cost, and security. SLIM, like all symmetric block ciphers, encrypts and decrypts using the same key. The suggested method performs well in both hardware and software contexts, has a small implementation footprint, a reasonable cost/security ratio for RFID devices, and is energyefficient. SLIM has shown high immunity to the most successful linear and differential cryptanalysis assaults, as well as a substantial margin of defense against them.

E-banking means electronic banking which is popularly known as anywhere banking. Electronic banking also known as EFT (electronic Fund Transfer) means transfer amount online from one account to another account rather by using physical cheque. Information technology has taken important place in the future development of financial service, specially banking sector transaction are affected more than any other financial provider groups. Increased use of mobile services and use of internet as a new distribution channel for banking transactions and international trading requires more attention towards e-banking security against fraudulent activities. The development and the increasing progress that is being experienced in the Information and Communication Technology have brought about a lot of changes in almost all facets of life. In the Banking Industry, it has been in the form of online banking, which is now replacing the traditional banking practice. Although it is proving boon to all sectors especially to all types of customers and financial sector but its growing use without awareness has also attracted many crimes and frauds. Through this paper, it is tried tom discuss about growth of E-banking along with growing challenges of risk & Insecurity. Emphasis is given on awareness to be given to E-banking users and establishment of more security measures to avoid chances of misappropriation of funds and cybercrimes. Online banking has a lot of benefits which add value to customers’ satisfaction in terms of better quality of service offerings and at the same time enable the banks gain more competitive advantage over other competitors. This paper discusses some challenges in an emerging economy and benefits of E-banking.

This study was focused on evaluating the factors influencing the decision of customers of GCB bank on the adoption of e-banking. The study used a descriptive design where a structured questionnaire was administered to 351 customers of five selected GCB bank branches in the Kumasi Metropolis using convenient sampling technique. Data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 software. It was identified that although people have knowledge about e-banking, their focus on using it is a bit questionable. For instance, customers are much more conversant in the use of SMS banking and ATM as compared to their conversant use of credit cards, internet banking and phone banking. In terms of the useful features of e-banking that necessitates its adoption by customers, e-banking was seen as convenient, easily accessible, easy to use, useful, advantageous and highly secured. However, issues of inadequate education, huge security issues, high illiteracy, network failure, inadequate governmental policies and slow response from the bank are possible in curtailing the frequent adoption of the services by customers of the bank. Therefore, the management of the bank should put in structures and measures to make the e-banking platforms adopted by the bank more user friendly for customers to subscribe to the products.

Purpose – Opportunities for malicious cyber activities have expanded with the globalisation and advancements in information and communication technology. Such activities will increasingly affect the security of businesses with online presence and/or connected to the internet. Although the real estate sector is a potential attack vector for and target of malicious cyber activities, it is an understudied industry. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the information security threats, awareness, and risk management standards currently employed by the real estate sector in South Australia. Design/methodology/approach – The current study comprises both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, which include 20 survey questionnaires and 20 face-to-face interviews conducted in South Australia. Findings – There is a lack of understanding about the true magnitude of malicious cyber activities and its impact on the real estate sector, as illustrated in the findings of 40 real estate organisations in South Australia. The findings and the escalating complexities of the online environment underscore the need for regular ongoing training programs for basic online security (including new cybercrime trends) and the promotion of a culture of information security (e.g. when using smart mobile devices to store and access sensitive data) among staff. Such initiatives will enable staff employed in the (South Australian) real estate sector to maintain the current knowledge of the latest cybercrime activities and the best cyber security protection measures available. Originality/value – This is the first academic study focusing on the real estate organisations in South Australia. The findings will contribute to the evidence on the information security threats faced by the sector as well as in develop sector-specific information security risk management guidelines.

The NIS Directive [1] defines critical infrastructures and operators of essential services. It also calls for organizational measures to ensure these infrastructures are protected from cybercrime and terrorism. This also includes the establishment of a national framework for emergency response. The list of essential services in Annex II does contain certain elements of Internet infrastructures, such as Domain Name Servers and Internet Exchange Points. However, in a truly remarkable omission, the Directive does not include Internet Service Providers (ISP) [2]. Since operators of essential services are subject to stringent security requirements, it would be helpful to include them as operators of essential services. This seems even more appropriate as many other Annex II infrastructures, such as banking, health and transport, heavily rely on a working Internet infrastructure, which is largely dependent on ISPs. This paper discusses the omission in the NIS Directive of the ISPs and the incomplete list and codependent registries namely, the IP address space registry and the Autonomous System registry and their necessity in supporting the root Domain Name System.

The purpose of the work is to consider the theoretical and practical aspects of fraud in the Internet sphere and on this basis to identify ways to ensure the confidentiality and cybersecurity of private users and commercial organizations. The methodological basis of the work is the use of general and special methods of scientific knowledge. Methods of combining analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction have been used to identify different types of fraud in the Internet. Generalization methods, logical and empirical, were used in determining the directions of development of the national cyber defense system and ensuring confidentiality. The main results of the work: The most common methods of fraud with the use of bank payment cards are identified, among which: a fake poll on social networks with a prize draw; a phone call to obtain classified information; SIM card replacement for access to online banking; online payments on unsecured sites; phishing; copying card data when handed over; unsecured WI-Fi networks; computers in public places; skimming for card data theft; unauthorized micropayments; ATM fraud; use of malicious programs (viruses), fake sites in order to compromise the details of electronic payment instruments and/or logins/passwords for access to Internet/mobile banking systems; dissemination (sale, dissemination) of information on compromised data; terminal network fraud; fraud in remote service systems; social engineering. Basic security rules are defined to prevent fraud. The experience of European countries in the field of cybersecurity is analyzed. The directions of adaptation of the current legislation on cybersecurity to the EU standards are outlined and the directions of development of the national system of cybersecurity are defined. The practical significance of the results is to deepen the understanding of the nature and mechanism of various types of fraud in the Internet. The recommendations proposed in the paper can form a methodological and theoretical basis for the development of economic policy of the state to ensure the confidentiality and cybersecurity of private users and commercial organizations. Conclusions. The state should establish an effective oversight body in the field of personal data protection, but security measures and online restrictions should comply with international standards. The use of encryption should not be prohibited at the legislative level, as such restrictions reduce the ability of citizens to protect themselves from illegal intrusions into privacy. In addition, the state policy in the Internet should be aimed at promoting the development and operation of secure Internet technologies and the formation of mechanisms to protect against services and protocols that threaten the technical functioning of the Internet from viruses, phishing and more.

Banks play a crucial role in promoting online businesses. Even though e-shoppers have the option of cash-on-delivery, which seems to be secure and trustworthy, still there is an urge for the e-payment schemes, which can only be provided through banks. Banks act as strong and trustworthy intermediaries in the online transactions and they provide a bold opening in the online business. At present, banks have e-payment systems like Internet banking, electronic fund transfers (NEFT/RTGS), plastic money (credit card & debit card) and mobile banking. These systems provide payment to online transactions like online purchases of products, mobile recharges, hotel booking, ticket booking, etc. by considering all types of security measures. For the real working of these e-services, the need of apt infrastructures is an inevitable feature. This paper examines the efficient utilization of mobile banking by the bank customers who have all the infrastructures for availing the same. The results showed that the majority of the sample customers selected for the study owned a mobile but only few of them use a mobile as their mode of access to banks. They also revealed that the people were comparatively well aware of mobile banking, but its usage level was very low. The mostly used e-settlement with mobile banking was for mobile top-up by urban area customers and rural area customers and there was no significant difference between the urban area and rural area customers regarding the utilization of mobile banking. Keywords: virtual banking, mobile banking, online business, inter-bank mobile payment system (IMPS). JEL Classification: L86, L81

With the integration of industrial Internet of Things technology and traditional industries, industrial Internet of Things has profoundly changed the production mode, organization mode, and business model of traditional industries. While people are enjoying the convenience brought by the Internet, their concerns about personal privacy are gradually increasing. Maintaining the value stability of RMB payment means and the security and efficiency of RMB settlement system are the key measures to promote the internationalization of RMB. Aiming at the problem of data insecurity and untrustworthiness in traditional information systems, this paper proposes a data protection technology for information systems based on blockchain. In the hierarchical authority information system, multichain structure is adopted to divide the authority of nodes in each layer, so that only the nodes with corresponding authority can access and operate data. Private digital currency, which is based on blockchain technology and represented by payment token and stable currency, helps to improve the defects of the agent banking model but increases additional market risks and trust risks. Blockchain technology adopts special networking technology and consensus mechanism. Therefore, in blockchain privacy protection, the focus of blockchain privacy protection is identity information and transaction information.

Introduction. In the current global crisis, the spread of globalization, unstable economy in the country, the emergence of threats related to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of quarantine in the country, it is necessary to analyze their impact on banking institutions in Ukraine and accordingly to the national security of Ukraine. Purpose. The main purpose of the study is to analyze the current state of the banking services market of Ukraine during a pandemic and to develop practical recommendations for its further development. Results. The state of the Ukrainian market of banking services in the conditions of a pandemic is analyzed. The dynamics of operating banks in Ukraine is studied. The TOP-10 banking institutions according to the stability rating and the leaders of the people's rating of banking institutions are presented. It is noted that in modern conditions, the activities of banking institutions are extremely strongly influenced by external factors. The dynamics of gross domestic product volumes is considered. The dynamics of the discount rate of the National Bank of Ukraine is studied. The analysis of indicators of return on assets and capital of the banking system in Ukraine as a whole is carried out. Examples of adaptive solutions of banking institutions in Ukraine during a pandemic are given. It is noted that due to the introduction of quarantine in Ukraine, citizens began to actively and effectively use Internet technology to address their own issues and meet needs, thus accelerating the transition to the digital age. Conclusions. We are convinced that the introduction of adaptive measures of banking institutions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic for other banks will help to minimize the negative consequences and possible risks associated with such exposure. Thanks to timely decisions on the functioning of banking institutions, re-planning, changing approaches to customer service, banking institutions were able to adapt to the conditions caused by the pandemic, and reduce possible risks, losses and threats to their activities and generally positively affect the economy.

This paper uses data collected for an MA Thesis on Security Managers’ perspectives on challenges facing Commercial Banks in Preventing Frauds in Nairobi County, Kenya. The study was motivated by continued rise of frauds in commercial banks in the county, despite the extensive mitigation measures put in place to deter frauds. The study established the nature of frauds prevalent in Kenya commercial banks in Nairobi County, assessed the determinants of fraud in Kenya commercial banks, determined Bank Security Managers Capacity in fraud prevention, and finally examined Security Managers perceptions on the relationship between the existing preventive measures and emerging Bank fraud trends in Nairobi County, Kenya. The study was grounded by the Fraud Triangle concept and adopted a case study qualitative design. The main method of data collection was the interview. The study comprises of 50 respondents: 39 main respondents and 11 Key Informants. The census sampling Method was used to select respondents for the study. Data was transcribed and the transcriptions coded using NVIVO software. The study established three major types of frauds; Management frauds, Non-Management Frauds and Third Party Frauds, all said to be on an increase trend. According to this study fraud rates are higher at Nairobi County (90%), than at other counties (70%). Mobile and Internet banking frauds were found to be the new threats challenging commercial banks because by their very nature because of technological sophistication, were committed from geographical location including outside the country. The study established two major determinants of frauds; Fraudsters Perspectives and institutional related factors. Major fraudster’s perspectives include; condition under which people can rationalize their prospective crimes, opportunities to commit crimes, perceived suitability of targets for fraud, technical ability of the fraudster, the possibility and likelihood of the fraud being discovered and the nature of consequences. Institutional factors that influence fraud prevalence include; weak accounting and control systems, and ineffective internal audits. According to the study, technological sophistication has outsmarted many security managers in the banking sector, because of their technological skills gaps in Fraud forensics. Finally, the study established the relationship between existing preventive measures and emerging Bank fraud trends in Nairobi County. Major policy recommendations suggested to cut frauds at the nib include; benchmarking for best internationally recognized standards such as carrying out expected and unexpected audits, enforced internal controls, regular training of security managers, and review of commercial banks organogram that will place security managers at a position to police frauds perpetrated by management.

The goal of the study – development of specific methodical reasoned proposals on improvement of the mechanism for ensuring sustainable development of the national banking system and its security against external challenges and threats to cyberspace. The scientific novelty consists in a comprehensive analysis of the processes of ensuring the cyber stability of the Russian banking system in the context of escalation of external challenges and threats to the digital economy. The authors used the following methods: general scientific (observation, comparison, measurement, analysis and synthesis, logical reasoning method), specific scientific (static analysis, peer review, graphical method). In the article conducted a critical review of domestic and foreign scientific literature and practical recommendations to ensure the protection of the banking institution from cyber threats in the digital economy; presented a comparative analysis of the organization of the cybersecurity system in the Russian and foreign banking systems; done multidimensional statistical analysis of cyber threats for Russian banks; substantiated recommendations and proposals on organizational, economic and legal improvement of the system of protection of Russian banks from internal and external cyber threats. As a result, it is shown that the main problem points (zones) of the banking system, creating the prerequisites for the occurrence of cyber-risks are: 1) there is no exchange of information on cyber-attacks and their mechanisms; 2) banks interact inefficiently with the state regulator of Internet – Roskomnadzor; 3) low level of competence of bank employees who are responsible for cybersecurity; 4) limited budget of small and medium-sized banks that wouldn’t allow them to care independent cyber-protection units; 5) growing popularity of new fintech services and new fintech companies. The author draws a conclusion that the following measures are necessary for organizational, economic and legal improvement of the system of protection of Russian banks from internal and external cyber threats: the processes of development of banking ecosystems should be intensified; a federal interbank register of cyber fraudsters must be created; a single banking «polygon» for testing cyber threats needs to be developed.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to assess the precautionary measures adopted by the popular websites in India, and, thus, find out how vulnerable the Indian Web users are to this form of attack. Today almost all work is done through the Internet, including monetary transactions. This holds true even for developing countries like India, thus making secure browsing a necessity. However, an attack called “clickjacking” can help Internet scammers to carry out fraudulent tasks. Even though researchers had proposed different techniques to face this threat, it remains a question on how effectively they are deployed in practice. Design/methodology/approach – To carry out the study, top 100 Indian and global websites in India were identified and were divided into static and dynamic websites based on the level of interaction they offer to the users. These websites were checked to see whether they offer any basic protection against clickjacking and, if so, which defence technique is used. A comparison between Indian websites and global websites is done to see where India stands in terms of providing security. Findings – The results show that 86 per cent of Indian websites offer no protection against clickjacking, in contrast to 51 per cent of global websites. It is also observed that in the case of dynamic websites, only 18 per cent of Indian websites offer some form of protection, when compared to 63 per cent of global websites. This is quite alarming, as dynamic websites such as social networking and banking websites are the likely candidates for clickjacking, resulting in serious consequences such as identity and monetary theft. Originality/value – In this paper, vulnerability of Indian websites to clickjacking is presented, which was not addressed before. This will help in creating awareness among the Indian Web developers as well as the general public, so that precautionary measures can be adopted.

This paper investigates the challenges emerging trends on latest Information and Communication Technology and cybercrime in mobile money transaction services in Tanzania. The objective of this is to evaluate the challenges associated with this rapid growth in ICT and to determine factors influencing Cybersecurity readiness and Cybercrimes in mobile money transaction services. Cyber Security plays a significant role in the field of Information and Communication Technology especially on mobile money transaction services. The study recognizes the provision of mobile money services by both telecommunication companies and local banks, the fact is that whenever we think about the cyber security, the first thing that comes to our mind is “cybercrimes” which are increasing extremely day to day and become a threat. Cybercrimes are mostly practiced through both internet and mobile money services. Securing the information has become one of the major challenges in the present day. Various Governments and companies are taking measures in order to prevent these cybercrimes. Besides cyber security remains concern to many. This paper mainly focuses on challenges faced by cyber security on the latest information and communication technology and cybercrime especially in mobile money transaction services in Tanzania. Its latest techniques, ethics and trends that change the face of cyber security. Relevant data was collected from the Forensic Section of the Tanzania Police Force, Mobile banking mobile money agents and users of the mobile-money services. This study also used the Pearson correlation and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to establish different facts and determine whether the independent variables had a combined effect on the dependent variable. The findings of the study revealed that there is a positive and significant correlation between users’ awareness, mobile money agents training, top management support, technical and logical controls and cybersecurity readiness. The study also concluded that effective training programs aimed to enlighten the users and mobile money agents on cybersecurity issues are an important ingredient for cybersecurity readiness in cybercrime in mobile money transaction services.

Digital finance is widely regarded as one of the most effective means of financially empowering women and increasing their financial inclusion. On the other hand, cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to exploit vulnerabilities and developing ever more sophisticated attack methods. As a result, the cyber risk exposures and prevention of female heads of farm households in Southern Nigeria were investigated in this paper. Unsuccessful transactions by mobile applications and POINT OF SALES (POS) terminals were often encountered by female heads, and yet their money was debited, and it took a long time for their money that was debited from unsuccessful transactions to be reversed. Avoiding lonely ATMs and not going to the ATM during late hours, ignoring emails and text messages instructing them to provide online banking details, no longer using birthdates, addresses, and other words or numbers that would make it easier for attackers to figure out their passwords, and not using the same passwords for all their different accounts were the most common cybersecurity measures used by female heads. Access to digital financial products and services was influenced by factors such as marital status, household size, business experience, internet access, possession of an ICT device, and perceived security risks. These findings call for interventions by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through policies that will improve consumer education and reduce vulnerabilities, especially among women. The CBN should also develop a forum that is easily accessible to customers for filing complaints, and erring banks should be sanctioned.

The spread of the Corona epidemic around the world has resulted in a deterioration in the economic and social situation and the imposition of restrictions on citizens, such as wandering and domestic isolation, as this epidemic has not only changed how people live, but also how crime occurs. Where it showed the spread of a new type of crime represented in domestic violence and fraud via the Internet, and a new type of theft appeared in the form of face masks, medical equipment and oxygen, which became more attractive targets for theft, and in this context the importance of the intervention of the penal legislator appears in the difficult moments that citizens are going through as a result of This is a dangerous epidemic to bring the concept of public order into the core of its primary concerns through criminalization and punishment. And when the World Health Organization announced the transformation of the Corona virus into a pandemic, the features of the criminal phenomenon changed on several levels, as traditional criminal activities became almost non-existent and new criminal activities appeared, especially at the level of electronic crimes, so the state quickly changed its legal arsenal by taking new legislative measures and approaches by reducing this phenomenon and knowing the most important causes and factors causing it, such as the increasing demand for resorting to e-commerce markets and the intense resort to digital handling of money and financial and banking balances, which contributed to the spread of fraud and fraud, in addition to the spread of anxiety, fear and isolation among people, which led to easy Their exploitation and exposure to fraud and fraud, all these factors led to the difficulties faced by the security services, forcing them to re-equip themselves to face a new security policy in order to reduce crime‎‎. Keywords: Coronavirus, Crime, Theft, Health Law, Penal Code.

The economic sanctions of the United States, Canada, Australia, the EU in banking and technological sectors jeopardized Russia's national security. Moreover, the break of traditional technological chains of industrial enterprises in Russia and Ukraine set the task of accelerated import substitution. The economic situation inside the country is depressed, since internal reserves are insufficient for quick solution of the import substitution problem. An important condition to increase the efficiency of industrial production is the search for internal reserves at the local level, as well as ensuring sustainable operation of enterprises. The concept of sustainable operation of an enterprise includes its economic security, determined both by internal and external factors. In this paper a number of specific features of industrial production such as strict regulation and control by the state, a high level of specialization, technical complexity, the need for highly qualified specialists, and complexity of spatial placement is defined. Features of industrial production determine threats to the enterprise economic security. A high degree of regulation and control by the state creates the following threats: pressure of public authorities in order to obtain benefits, use of administrative resources in trade wars and raidership, frequent and drastic changes of laws, the risk of falling into dependence on officials, shareholders and partners. The focused narrow specialization of production negatively affects the ability of an enterprise to react quickly to market changes, and, first of all, the market conjuncture. This feature forms the following threats: falling demand for manufactured products, stiffening competition in a certain territory, aggravation of competition with enterprises producing similar goods, monopolization of the market, unfair competition. Due to technical complexity of the production process, the following threats arise: high degree of wear and tear of equipment, industrial injuries and manufacturing defects. A significant need for highly qualified specialists is conditioned by the complexity of the technological process and forms the following threats: labour shortage, low personnel qualifications, flow of highly qualified specialists to competitors, and the risky investments in personnel. The location of a number of industrial productions is bound to the locations of resources and markets. Metallurgical production is heavily dependent on the location of deposits of iron ore and coal. A number of industries gravitates to the market channels. Relationship of business owners and local authorities also influences enterprise location. Depending on the form of relationship, the enterprise is provided with the most comfortable or complicated business conditions. The considered specific features of ensuring economic security of industrial enterprises determined the arising threats. If security threats are known, they can be quantified, which will facilitate continuous monitoring of the situation. The program for ensuring economic security of an industrial enterprise should include continuous monitoring, a set of measures to neutralize threats and tools to minimize losses.

The economic sanctions of the United States, Canada, Australia, the EU in banking and technological sectors jeopardized Russia's national security. Moreover, the break of traditional technological chains of industrial enterprises in Russia and Ukraine set the task of accelerated import substitution. The economic situation inside the country is depressed, since internal reserves are insufficient for quick solution of the import substitution problem. An important condition to increase the efficiency of industrial production is the search for internal reserves at the local level, as well as ensuring sustainable operation of enterprises. The concept of sustainable operation of an enterprise includes its economic security, determined both by internal and external factors. In this paper a number of specific features of industrial production such as strict regulation and control by the state, a high level of specialization, technical complexity, the need for highly qualified specialists, and complexity of spatial placement is defined. Features of industrial production determine threats to the enterprise economic security. A high degree of regulation and control by the state creates the following threats: pressure of public authorities in order to obtain benefits, use of administrative resources in trade wars and raidership, frequent and drastic changes of laws, the risk of falling into dependence on officials, shareholders and partners. The focused narrow specialization of production negatively affects the ability of an enterprise to react quickly to market changes, and, first of all, the market conjuncture. This feature forms the following threats: falling demand for manufactured products, stiffening competition in a certain territory, aggravation of competition with enterprises producing similar goods, monopolization of the market, unfair competition. Due to technical complexity of the production process, the following threats arise: high degree of wear and tear of equipment, industrial injuries and manufacturing defects. A significant need for highly qualified specialists is conditioned by the complexity of the technological process and forms the following threats: labour shortage, low personnel qualifications, flow of highly qualified specialists to competitors, and the risky investments in personnel. The location of a number of industrial productions is bound to the locations of resources and markets. Metallurgical production is heavily dependent on the location of deposits of iron ore and coal. A number of industries gravitates to the market channels. Relationship of business owners and local authorities also influences enterprise location. Depending on the form of relationship, the enterprise is provided with the most comfortable or complicated business conditions. The considered specific features of ensuring economic security of industrial enterprises determined the arising threats. If security threats are known, they can be quantified, which will facilitate continuous monitoring of the situation. The program for ensuring economic security of an industrial enterprise should include continuous monitoring, a set of measures to neutralize threats and tools to minimize losses.

With the rapid developments in science and technology, today's age has begun to be called the "technology age". With the rapid development of technology, technological devices and innovations have started to take an important place in people's lives in this age. So much so that most innovations have now become a way of life, a way of life for individuals. Undoubtedly, one of the innovations that has become a way of life for people and that has affected their lives to such a great extent has been the "Internet", which enables communication through technological devices. Internet, personal computers, phones, tablets, etc. emerges as a communication network that provides global communication with smart technological devices. Although the Internet has introduced many innovations into our lives, it also contains some risks. This research was carried out to determine the internet risk awareness of parents. For this purpose, the interview form was used. In addition to the questions revealing the descriptive characteristics of the parents in the form, there are questions about whether there are problems encountered in the internet environment and what measures are taken for the problems encountered. In this direction, 20 parents of students studying at a private college in Konya were interviewed. Qualitative research method was used to analyze the obtained data. In the study in which content analysis was used, it was determined that all of the parents used smart phones and used the internet for less than 3 hours a day. In addition, it was concluded that the majority of parents have social media accounts. In the research, it has been determined that not all of the parents have encountered any health-related problems on the internet, but some parents have encountered problems in the social media usage process, communication, banking and trade areas on the internet. In the research, it was determined that the parents resorted to security measures such as "uninstalling the application on the phone, not accepting notifications from unknown accounts, applying to cyber security, keeping privacy settings up-to-date, blocking the person, changing the password" for the problems they encountered during the social media usage process. In the research, it has been determined that the parents who encounter problems with communication on the internet resort to "blocking uncontrolled advertisements, blocking offers from unknown accounts, keeping information safe and not accepting messages from unknown accounts". In the research, it has been determined that the parents who encounter problems with banking transactions on the internet resort to security measures such as "contacting the bank, installing a virus program on their phone, taking other measures regarding banking transactions, and calling the bank by not entering their account". Finally, in the research, it has been determined that the parents who encounter problems related to commerce or shopping transactions on the internet resort to security measures such as "complaining to the authorities about the problem, choosing reliable sites, checking whether the sites are 3D reliable, and switching to virtual card application".

Phishing is an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting public. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures. Many websites have now created secondary tools for applications, like maps for games, but they should be clearly marked as to who wrote them, and you should not use the same passwords anywhere on the internet.

Customer satisfaction measures how well the expectations of a customer concerning a product or service provided by a company have been met. Thus, customer satisfaction depends on several dimensions of service quality. Electronic banking or simply E-banking enables customers of a bank to conduct a range of financial transactions over the internet. E-banking services not only can create new competitive advantages, it can improve its relationships with customers. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the dimensions of E-banking service quality and customer satisfaction to determine which dimension can potentially have the strongest influence on customer satisfaction. Five service quality dimensions; Dependability, Timeliness, Security & Privacy, Physical facilities and Customize service derived with the support of literature review have been selected as forecasters of customer satisfaction in E-banking. Research design of the study is quantitative. Data has been gathered through already tested questionnaire from 265 E-banking users as respondents from Bangladesh through convenient sampling. Correlation, ANOVA and Multiple Regression model has been used to determine the significance level of the variables for the customer satisfaction in e-banking. Results of the study have revealed that there is significant relationship between service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction. Through this study we can conclude that service quality in E-banking leads to satisfied customers and thus banks can gain competitive advantage by offering better-quality services to their customers in today’s emulous world. KEYWORDS: E-banking, Customer satisfaction, Service quality, Bangladeshi banking sector

The development of non-cash forms of payment, the introduction of bank cards, Internet resources in the field of payments, is a characteristic feature of everyday life. In 2020–2021, due to quarantine measures, Ukrainians increasingly began to choose non-cash payments, payments and online purchases. The active use of the latest information technologies has led to the growth of various manifestations of fraud in the field of public relations, ranging from financial and credit and ending with foreign economic activity and the Internet. Financial fraud, which is a system of relations in the field of money circulation and financial obligations, the purpose of which is to misappropriate the financial resources of banks and/or their customers by deceiving or abusing the trust or position of citizens/employees of banking institutions. The imperfect legal system contributes to the fact that the state continues to actively implement various fraudulent schemes. It has been established that the main type of fraud in the banking sector is payment card fraud. The most common types of fraudulent transactions with bank cards are considered. Based on the analysis of the consequences of cyber-fraud, which occur in the use of payment instruments by banks, it is determined that the most vulnerable place is the client himself, who under the influence of various methods of social engineering becomes the object of fraud. Based on statistical data, the dynamics of the number and structure of crimes related to financial fraud in Ukraine is analyzed and the high level of their latency is emphasized. Emphasis is placed on the important role of the state in overcoming this negative phenomenon. Ensuring the effective functioning of commercial banks, the proper level of their financial security is impossible without the formation and implementation of an effective system for detecting and preventing financial fraud in banking institutions. Analyzing the modern security system, simple rules for using software and electronic payment systems, which are used all over the world, have been introduced. There are also ways to combat financial fraud in general and bank card transactions in particular, which has a positive effect on improving the financial security of a commercial bank.

The article analyzes the use of cryptocurrency in the economic turnover, which acts as a means of payment and accumulation, recognized at the legislative level by a number of states, including those entering the WTO; explores the possibilities of using cryptocurrency in the territories of states that are members of the WTO or other international organizations of economic integration, but did not legalize the possibility of introducing cryptocurrency into the national economy; Based on the analysis of the established advantages and possible negative qualities of the cryptocurrency, the directions of improving the legislation are proposed with the aim of minimizing the risks of public administration in the case of the introduction of the cryptocurrency into civil circulation as a means of payment and accumulation. One of the main threats of the usage of innovative financial assets on the state territory are attributed to the decentralization of the release of cryptocurrency, the mining of cryptocurrency is currently carried out by solving a mathematical algorithm by almost any subject of law located, who has access to the Internet. In the article described the legal regulation of regional economic integration, the creation of a single economic space and the legal conditions of free, within the EAEU, movement of goods, works, services and financial resources, the legislation of the member states governing economic relations, which should be unified, which will allow business entities to freely carry out economic activities throughout the EAEU on equal terms, independent of the country of registration and the country of the place of economic activity. The compliance of cryptocurrency turnover with prudential regulation of banking, a set of legal measures should be developed to minimize the risks of banking in the context of using cryptocurrency as a means of payment.

This paper is included in the First Monday Special Issue #3: Internet banking, e-money, and Internet gift economies, published in December 2005. Special Issue editor Mark A. Fox asked authors to submit additional comments regarding their articles. E-money four years later In the late 1990s, there was a lively debate about the implications of the newly emerging e-money on the ability of central banks to control monetary aggregates.[1] What caught the imagination of many observers was not so much the fact that new types of money were electronic. Rather, it was the potential that new forms of money were capable to be transferred via the internet without the intervention of a traditional credit institution. More than anything else, the trial of DigiCash in 1994 with its ‘Cyberbucks’ rang the alarm bells of monetary authorities. It had everything they feared: it was issued by a non-bank, it could be used via the internet, it was P2P capable and it was anonymous. Against this background, a debate ensued about the merits of the new type of money and its potential to limit the power of central banks. Central banks and international bodies such as the Bank for International Settlements published a large number of reports [2] and academics scrutinised the issues involved. Finally, law makers took to the issue and e-money became subject of regulation in a number of countries. Thus, after long debates, the E-Money Directive of the European Union was passed in 2001 (it is currently reviewed). By 2001, however, many of the early pioneers such as DigiCash, Cybercash or First Virtual had gone out of business. The whole discussion began losing steam. Moreover, the very concept of ‘e-money’ was slowly changing. Initially, e-money was meant to be a close electronic substitute for cash: a bearer instrument, capable to circulate, anonymous, etc. To some degree, this was achieved by e-purses. However, only to a degree because e-purses do not allow balances to circulate. The recipient has to return balances to financial institutions and the corresponding value will be credited to a bank account. Thus, from the point of view of the payor, e-purses have a lot in common with cash, but not from the point of view of the payee. On the internet, nothing like the envisioned digital bearer certificates has emerged. Rather, today, what is called ‘e-money’ consists of limited purpose accounts with non-banks. In the EU these non-banks have to obtain an e-money licence. In the U.S. they may be required to hold state money transmitter licences. These accounts have much more in common with bank accounts than with cash. What drives the demand for these products is convenience of use. Thus, in the end, the internet e-money that exists is not a new type of money at all. And the card based e-money is struggling in many parts of the world. Only recently, one of the first e-purse schemes, the Danish Danmont has been discontinued. What are the lessons? 1. I think the approach by Alan Greenspan to take a ‘wait and see’ attitude was vindicated. Strict ex ante regulation of new concepts and products make life difficult for small start-ups and thus slows down innovation. Moreover, early regulation may be misguided because it is not known well what to regulate. Thus, the type of e-money regulators had in mind in the late 1990s (digital bearer instruments) never took off. 2. Payments exhibit strong network effects. Therefore, any new instrument that is meant to be more than just a niche product has be firmly connected with the payment backbone: the bank-based retail and wholesale payment system. Therefore, the emergence of a parallel circulation of alternative monies should not worry central bankers. Such schemes are unlikely to grow beyond the already existing scale (in form of barter schemes etc.). Technological innovations are unlikely to change this. This is the point made in my paper and I think it is still valid. 3. The early discussion was very much about technical issues. Innovators that entered the market were technology companies. However, the payment industry also is, to a considerable extent, a service industry. The early newcomers ignored this and paid the price. They all vanished from the market. Today’s successful internet payment providers are much more focussed on service than their predecessors. 4. It seems wise to let non-banks have a share of the payment market. Internet payments, for example, require a mix of technological skills and quality of service that banks may often be unable to provide. Notes to Special Issue Update 1. Strictly speaking, the term e-money was a misnomer. It implied that traditional monies were non-electronic. But as a matter of fact, bank deposits had been electronic for many years already. 2. Between 1996 and 2001 the BIS published 5 reports on e-money. The ECB (and its predecessor the EMI) published 2 reports (1994 and 1998) and a security framework for e-money issuers (2002). The European Commission passed an E-Money Directive that came into force in 2002. In some countries law makers were much faster. Thus, the German government amended the German banking law in 1997 requiring e-money issuers to become banks. Technically, it is conceivable that banks (or even non-banks) that are based in offshore centres can issue e-money and distribute it via the Internet all over the world. Therefore, many economists see offshore e-money issuers as a severe threat to the ability of central banks to conduct monetary policy. In this paper, it is argued that offshore issuers will denominate their e-money products in terms of existing currencies. Therefore they will be affected by monetary policy measures in the same way as onshore banks.

IntroductionIn July 1997, the Mackay campus of Central Queensland University hosted a conference with the theme Regional Australia: Visions of Mackay. It was the first academic conference to be held at the young campus, and its aim was to provide an opportunity for academics, business people, government officials, and other interested parties to discuss their visions for the development of Mackay, a regional community of 75,000 people situated on the Central Queensland coast (Danaher). I delivered a presentation at that conference and authored a chapter in the book that emerged from its proceedings. The chapter entitled “Mackay Online” explored the potential impact that the Internet could have on the Mackay region, particularly in the areas of regional business, education, health, and entertainment (Pace). Two decades later, how does the reality compare with that vision?Broadband BluesAt the time of the Visions of Mackay conference, public commercial use of the Internet was in its infancy. Many Internet services and technologies that users take for granted today were uncommon or non-existent then. Examples include online video, video-conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), blogs, social media, peer-to-peer file sharing, payment gateways, content management systems, wireless data communications, smartphones, mobile applications, and tablet computers. In 1997, most users connected to the Internet using slow dial-up modems with speeds ranging from 28.8 Kbps to 33.6 Kbps. 56 Kbps modems had just become available. Lamenting these slow data transmission speeds, I looked forward to a time when widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks would allow the Internet’s services to “expand to include electronic commerce, home entertainment and desktop video-conferencing” (Pace 103). Although that future eventually arrived, I incorrectly anticipated how it would arrive.In 1997, Optus and Telstra were engaged in the rollout of hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) networks in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane for the Optus Vision and Foxtel pay TV services (Meredith). These HFC networks had a large amount of unused bandwidth, which both Telstra and Optus planned to use to provide broadband Internet services. Telstra's Big Pond Cable broadband service was already available to approximately one million households in Sydney and Melbourne (Taylor), and Optus was considering extending its cable network into regional Australia through partnerships with smaller regional telecommunications companies (Lewis). These promising developments seemed to point the way forward to a future high-bandwidth network, but that was not the case. A short time after the Visions of Mackay conference, Telstra and Optus ceased the rollout of their HFC networks in response to the invention of Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a technology that increases the bandwidth of copper wire and enables Internet connections of up to 6 Mbps over the existing phone network. ADSL was significantly faster than a dial-up service, it was broadly available to homes and businesses across the country, and it did not require enormous investment in infrastructure. However, ADSL could not offer speeds anywhere near the 27 Mbps of the HFC networks. When it came to broadband provision, Australia seemed destined to continue playing catch-up with the rest of the world. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2009 Australia ranked 18th in the world for broadband penetration, with 24.1 percent of Australians having a fixed-line broadband subscription. Statistics like these eventually prompted the federal government to commit to the deployment of a National Broadband Network (NBN). In 2009, the Kevin Rudd Government announced that the NBN would combine fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), fixed wireless, and satellite technologies to deliver Internet speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 90 percent of Australian homes, schools, and workplaces (Rudd).The rollout of the NBN in Mackay commenced in 2013 and continued, suburb by suburb, until its completion in 2017 (Frost, “Mackay”; Garvey). The rollout was anything but smooth. After a change of government in 2013, the NBN was redesigned to reduce costs. A mixed copper/optical technology known as fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) replaced FTTP as the preferred approach for providing most NBN connections. The resulting connection speeds were significantly slower than the 100 Mbps that was originally proposed. Many Mackay premises could only achieve a maximum speed of 40 Mbps, which led to some overcharging by Internet service providers, and subsequent compensation for failing to deliver services they had promised (“Optus”). Some Mackay residents even complained that their new NBN connections were slower than their former ADSL connections. NBN Co representatives claimed that the problems were due to “service providers not buying enough space in the network to provide the service they had promised to customers” (“Telcos”). Unsurprisingly, the number of complaints about the NBN that were lodged with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman skyrocketed during the last six months of 2017. Queensland complaints increased by approximately 40 percent when compared with the same period during the previous year (“Qld”).Despite the challenges presented by infrastructure limitations, the rollout of the NBN was a boost for the Mackay region. For some rural residents, it meant having reliable Internet access for the first time. Frost, for example, reports on the experiences of a Mackay couple who could not get an ADSL service at their rural home because it was too far away from the nearest telephone exchange. Unreliable 3G mobile broadband was the only option for operating their air-conditioning business. All of that changed with the arrival of the NBN. “It’s so fast we can run a number of things at the same time”, the couple reported (“NBN”).Networking the NationOne factor that contributed to the uptake of Internet services in the Mackay region after the Visions of Mackay conference was the Australian Government’s Networking the Nation (NTN) program. When the national telecommunications carrier Telstra was partially privatised in 1997, and further sold in 1999, proceeds from the sale were used to fund an ambitious communications infrastructure program named Networking the Nation (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts). The program funded projects that improved the availability, accessibility, affordability, and use of communications facilities and services throughout regional Australia. Eligibility for funding was limited to not-for-profit organisations, including local councils, regional development organisations, community groups, local government associations, and state and territory governments.In 1998, the Mackay region received $930,000 in Networking the Nation funding for Mackay Regionlink, a project that aimed to provide equitable community access to online services, skills development for local residents, an affordable online presence for local business and community organisations, and increased external awareness of the Mackay region (Jewell et al.). One element of the project was a training program that provided basic Internet skills to 2,168 people across the region over a period of two years. A second element of the project involved the establishment of 20 public Internet access centres in locations throughout the region, such as libraries, community centres, and tourist information centres. The centres provided free Internet access to users and encouraged local participation and skill development. More than 9,200 users were recorded in these centres during the first year of the project, and the facilities remained active until 2006. A third element of the project was a regional web portal that provided a free easily-updated online presence for community organisations. The project aimed to have every business and community group in the Mackay region represented on the website, with hosting fees for the business web pages funding its ongoing operation and development. More than 6,000 organisations were listed on the site, and the project remained financially viable until 2005.The availability, affordability and use of communications facilities and services in Mackay increased significantly during the period of the Regionlink project. Changes in technology, services, markets, competition, and many other factors contributed to this increase, so it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Mackay Regionlink fostered those outcomes. However, the large number of people who participated in the Regionlink training program and made use of the public Internet access centres, suggests that the project had a positive influence on digital literacy in the Mackay region.The Impact on BusinessThe Internet has transformed regional business for both consumers and business owners alike since the Visions of Mackay conference. When Mackay residents made a purchase in 1997, their choice of suppliers was limited to a few local businesses. Today they can shop online in a global market. Security concerns were initially a major obstacle to the growth of electronic commerce. Consumers were slow to adopt the Internet as a place for doing business, fearing that their credit card details would be vulnerable to hackers once they were placed online. After observing the efforts that finance and software companies were making to eliminate those obstacles, I anticipated that it would only be a matter of time before online transactions became commonplace:Consumers seeking a particular product will be able to quickly find the names of suitable suppliers around the world, compare their prices, and place an order with the one that can deliver the product at the cheapest price. (Pace 106)This expectation was soon fulfilled by the arrival of online payment systems such as PayPal in 1998, and online shopping services such as eBay in 1997. eBay is a global online auction and shopping website where individuals and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. The eBay service is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged modest fees when they make a sale. It exemplifies the notion of “friction-free capitalism” articulated by Gates (157).In 1997, regional Australian business owners were largely sceptical about the potential benefits the Internet could bring to their businesses. Only 11 percent of Australian businesses had some form of web presence, and less than 35 percent of those early adopters felt that their website was significant to their business (Department of Industry, Science and Tourism). Anticipating the significant opportunities that the Internet offered Mackay businesses to compete in new markets, I recommended that they work “towards the goal of providing products and services that meet the needs of international consumers as well as local ones” (107). In the two decades that have passed since that time, many Mackay businesses have been doing just that. One prime example is Big on Shoes (bigonshoes.com.au), a retailer of ladies’ shoes from sizes five to fifteen (Plane). Big on Shoes has physical shopfronts in Mackay and Moranbah, an online store that has been operating since 2009, and more than 12,000 followers on Facebook. This speciality store caters for women who have traditionally been unable to find shoes in their size. As the store’s customer base has grown within Australia and internationally, an unexpected transgender market has also emerged. In 2018 Big on Shoes was one of 30 regional businesses featured in the first Facebook and Instagram Annual Gift Guide, and it continues to build on its strengths (Cureton).The Impact on HealthThe growth of the Internet has improved the availability of specialist health services for people in the Mackay region. Traditionally, access to surgical services in Mackay has been much more limited than in metropolitan areas because of the shortage of specialists willing to practise in regional areas (Green). In 2003, a senior informant from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons bluntly described the Central Queensland region from Mackay to Gladstone as “a black hole in terms of surgery” (Birrell et al. 15). In 1997 I anticipated that, although the Internet would never completely replace a visit to a local doctor or hospital, it would provide tools that improve the availability of specialist medical services for people living in regional areas. Using these tools, doctors would be able to “analyse medical images captured from patients living in remote locations” and “diagnose patients at a distance” (Pace 108).These expectations have been realised in the form of Queensland Health’s Telehealth initiative, which permits medical specialists in Brisbane and Townsville to conduct consultations with patients at the Mackay Base Hospital using video-conference technology. Telehealth reduces the need for patients to travel for specialist advice, and it provides health professionals with access to peer support. Averill (7), for example, reports on the experience of a breast cancer patient at the Mackay Base Hospital who was able to participate in a drug trial with a Townsville oncologist through the Telehealth network. Mackay health professionals organised the patient’s scans, administered blood tests, and checked her lymph nodes, blood pressure and weight. Townsville health professionals then used this information to advise the Mackay team about her ongoing treatment. The patient expressed appreciation that the service allowed her to avoid the lengthy round-trip to Townsville. Prior to being offered the Telehealth option, she had refused to participate in the trial because “the trip was just too much of a stumbling block” (Averill 7).The Impact on Media and EntertainmentThe field of media and entertainment is another aspect of regional life that has been reshaped by the Internet since the Visions of Mackay conference. Most of these changes have been equally apparent in both regional and metropolitan areas. Over the past decade, the way individuals consume media has been transformed by new online services offering user-generated video, video-on-demand, and catch-up TV. These developments were among the changes I anticipated in 1997:The convergence of television and the Internet will stimulate the creation of new services such as video-on-demand. Today television is a synchronous media—programs are usually viewed while they are being broadcast. When high-quality video can be transmitted over the information superhighway, users will be able to watch what they want, when and where they like. […] Newly released movies will continue to be rented, but probably not from stores. Instead, consumers will shop on the information superhighway for movies that can be delivered on demand.In the mid-2000s, free online video-sharing services such as YouTube and Vimeo began to emerge. These websites allow users to freely upload, view, share, comment on, and curate online videos. Subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have also become increasingly popular since that time. These services offer online streaming of a library of films and television programs for a fee of less than 20 dollars per month. Computers, smart TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and other devices provide a multitude of ways of accessing streaming services. Some of these devices cost less than 100 dollars, while higher-end electronic devices include the capability as a bundled feature. Netflix became available in Mackay at the time of its Australian launch in 2015. The growth of streaming services greatly reduced the demand for video rental shops in the region, and all closed down as a result. The last remaining video rental store in Mackay closed its doors in 2018 after trading for 26 years (“Last”).Some of the most dramatic transformations that have occurred the field of media and entertainment were not anticipated in 1997. The rise of mobile technology, including wireless data communications, smartphones, mobile applications, and tablet computers, was largely unforeseen at that time. Some Internet luminaries such as Vinton Cerf expected that mobile access to the Internet via laptop computers would become commonplace (Lange), but this view did not encompass the evolution of smartphones, and it was not widely held. Similarly, the rise of social media services and the impact they have had on the way people share content and communicate was generally unexpected. In some respects, these phenomena resemble the Black Swan events described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (xvii)—surprising events with a major effect that are often inappropriately rationalised after the fact. They remind us of how difficult it is to predict the future media landscape by extrapolating from things we know, while failing to take into consideration what we do not know.The Challenge for MackayIn 1997, when exploring the potential impact that the Internet could have on the Mackay region, I identified a special challenge that the community faced if it wanted to be competitive in this new environment:The region has traditionally prospered from industries that control physical resources such as coal, sugar and tourism, but over the last two decades there has been a global ‘shift away from physical assets and towards information as the principal driver of wealth creation’ (Petre and Harrington 1996). The risk for Mackay is that its residents may be inclined to believe that wealth can only be created by means of industries that control physical assets. The community must realise that its value-added information is at least as precious as its abundant natural resources. (110)The Mackay region has not responded well to this challenge, as evidenced by measures such as the Knowledge City Index (KCI), a collection of six indicators that assess how well a city is positioned to grow and advance in today’s technology-driven, knowledge-based economy. A 2017 study used the KCI to conduct a comparative analysis of 25 Australian cities (Pratchett, Hu, Walsh, and Tuli). Mackay rated reasonably well in the areas of Income and Digital Access. But the city’s ratings were “very limited across all the other measures of the KCI”: Knowledge Capacity, Knowledge Mobility, Knowledge Industries and Smart Work (44).The need to be competitive in a technology-driven, knowledge-based economy is likely to become even more pressing in the years ahead. The 2017 World Energy Outlook Report estimated that China’s coal use is likely to have peaked in 2013 amid a rapid shift toward renewable energy, which means that demand for Mackay’s coal will continue to decline (International Energy Agency). The sugar industry is in crisis, finding itself unable to diversify its revenue base or increase production enough to offset falling global sugar prices (Rynne). The region’s biggest tourism drawcard, the Great Barrier Reef, continues to be degraded by mass coral bleaching events and ongoing threats posed by climate change and poor water quality (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority). All of these developments have disturbing implications for Mackay’s regional economy and its reliance on coal, sugar, and tourism. Diversifying the local economy through the introduction of new knowledge industries would be one way of preparing the Mackay region for the impact of new technologies and the economic challenges that lie ahead.ReferencesAverill, Zizi. “Webcam Consultations.” Daily Mercury 22 Nov. 2018: 7.Birrell, Bob, Lesleyanne Hawthorne, and Virginia Rapson. The Outlook for Surgical Services in Australasia. Melbourne: Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research, 2003.Cureton, Aidan. “Big Shoes, Big Ideas.” Daily Mercury 8 Dec. 2018: 12.Danaher, Geoff. Ed. Visions of Mackay: Conference Papers. Rockhampton: Central Queensland UP, 1998.Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Networking the Nation: Evaluation of Outcomes and Impacts. Canberra: Australian Government, 2005.Department of Industry, Science and Tourism. Electronic Commerce in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government, 1998.Frost, Pamela. “Mackay Is Up with Switch to Speed to NBN.” Daily Mercury 15 Aug. 2013: 8.———. “NBN Boost to Business.” Daily Mercury 29 Oct. 2013: 3.Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.Garvey, Cas. “NBN Rollout Hit, Miss in Mackay.” Daily Mercury 11 Jul. 2017: 6.Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Reef Blueprint: Great Barrier Reef Blueprint for Resilience. Townsville: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2017.Green, Anthony. “Surgical Services and Referrals in Rural and Remote Australia.” Medical Journal of Australia 177.2 (2002): 110–11.International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook 2017. France: IEA Publications, 2017.Jewell, Roderick, Mary O’Flynn, Fiorella De Cindio, and Margaret Cameron. “RCM and MRL—A Reflection on Two Approaches to Constructing Communication Memory.” Constructing and Sharing Memory: Community Informatics, Identity and Empowerment. Eds. Larry Stillman and Graeme Johanson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 73–86.Lange, Larry. “The Internet: Where’s It All Going?” Information Week 17 Jul. 1995: 30.“Last Man Standing Shuts Doors after 26 Years of Trade.” Daily Mercury 28 Aug. 2018: 7.Lewis, Steve. “Optus Plans to Share Cost Burden.” Australian Financial Review 22 May 1997: 26.Meredith, Helen. “Time Short for Cable Modem.” Australian Financial Review 10 Apr. 1997: 42Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.“Optus Offers Comp for Slow NBN.” Daily Mercury 10 Nov. 2017: 15.Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Fixed Broadband Subscriptions.” OECD Data, n.d. <https://data.oecd.org/broadband/fixed-broadband-subscriptions.htm>.Pace, Steven. “Mackay Online.” Visions of Mackay: Conference Papers. Ed. Geoff Danaher. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998. 111–19.Petre, Daniel and David Harrington. The Clever Country? Australia’s Digital Future. Sydney: Lansdown Publishing, 1996.Plane, Melanie. “A Shoe-In for Big Success.” Daily Mercury 9 Sep. 2017: 6.Pratchett, Lawrence, Richard Hu, Michael Walsh, and Sajeda Tuli. The Knowledge City Index: A Tale of 25 Cities in Australia. Canberra: University of Canberra neXus Research Centre, 2017.“Qld Customers NB-uN Happy Complaints about NBN Service Double in 12 Months.” Daily Mercury 17 Apr. 2018: 1.Rudd, Kevin. “Media Release: New National Broadband Network.” Parliament of Australia Press Release, 7 Apr. 2009 <https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:"media/pressrel/PS8T6">.Rynne, David. “Revitalising the Sugar Industry.” Sugar Policy Insights Feb. 2019: 2–3.Taylor, Emma. “A Dip in the Pond.” Sydney Morning Herald 16 Aug. 1997: 12.“Telcos and NBN Co in a Crisis.” Daily Mercury 27 Jul. 2017: 6.

If the home is traditionally considered to be a space of safety associated with the warm and cosy feeling of the familial hearth, it is also continuously portrayed as a space under threat from the outside from which we must secure ourselves and our families. Securing the home entails a series of material, discursive and performative strategies, a host of precautionary measures aimed at regulating and ultimately producing security. When I was eleven my family returned home from the local fruit markets to find our house had been ransacked. Clothes were strewn across the floor, electrical appliances were missing and my parents’ collection of jewellery – wedding rings and heirlooms – had been stolen. Few things remained untouched and the very thought of someone else’s hands going through our personal belongings made our home feel tainted. My parents were understandably distraught. As Filipino immigrants to Australia the heirlooms were not only expensive assets from both sides of my family, but also signifiers of our homeland. Added to their despair was the fact that this was our first house – we had rented prior to that. During the police interviews, we discovered that our area, Sydney’s Western suburbs, was considered ‘high-risk’ and we were advised to install security. In their panic my parents began securing their home. Grills were installed on every window. Each external wooden door was reinforced by a metal security door. Movement detectors were installed at the front of the house, which were set to blind intruders with floodlights. Even if an intruder could enter the back through a window a metal grill security door was waiting between the backroom and the kitchen to stop them from getting to our bedrooms. In short, through a series of transformations our house was made into a residential fortress. Yet home security had its own dangers. A series of rules and regulations were drilled into me ‘in case of an emergency’: know where your keys are in case of a fire so that you can get out; remember the phone numbers for an emergency and the work numbers of your parents; never let a stranger into the house; and if you need to speak to a stranger only open the inside door but leave the security screen locked. Thus, for my Filipino-migrant family in the 1990s, a whole series of defensive behaviours and preventative strategies were produced and disseminated inside and around the home to regulate security risks. Such “local knowledges” were used to reinforce the architectural manifestations of security at the same time that they were a response to the invasion of security systems into our house that created a new set of potential dangers. This article highlights “the interplay of material and symbolic geographies of home” (Blunt and Varley 4), focusing on the relation between urban fears circulating around and within the home and the spatial practices used to negotiate such fears. In exploring home security systems it extends the exemplary analysis of home technologies already begun in Lynn Spigel’s reading of the ‘smart home’ (381-408). In a similar vein, David Morley’s analysis of mediated domesticity shows how communications technology has reconfigured the inside and outside to the extent that television actually challenges the physical boundary that “protects the privacy and solidarity of the home from the flux and threat of the outside world” (87). Television here serves as a passage in which the threat of the outside is reframed as news or entertainment for family viewing. I take this as a point of departure to consider the ways that this mediated fear unfolds in the technology of our homes. Following Brian Massumi, I read the home as “a node in a circulatory network of many dimensions (each corresponding to a technology of transmission)” (85). For Massumi, the home is an event-space at the crossroads of media technologies and political technologies. “In spite of the locks on the door, the event-space of the home must be seen as one characterized by a very loose regime of passage” (85). The ‘locked door’ is not only a boundary marker that defines the inside from the outside but another technology that leads us outside the home into other domains of inquiry: the proliferation of security technologies and the mundane, fearful intimacies of the home. In this context, we should heed Iris Marion Young’s injunction to feminist critics that the home does provide some positives including a sense of privacy and the space to build relationships and identities. Yet, as Colomina argues, the traditional domestic ideal “can only be produced by engaging the home in combat” (20). If, as Colomina’s comment suggests, ontological security is at least partially dependent on physical security, then this article explores the ontological effects of our home security systems. Houses at War: Targeting the Family As Beatriz Colomina reminds us, in times of war we leave our homelands to do battle on the front line, but battle lines are also being drawn in our homes. Drawing inspiration from Virilio’s claim that contemporary war takes place without fighting, Colomina’s article ‘Domesticity at War’ contemplates the domestic interior as a “battlefield” (15). The house, she writes, is “a mechanism within a war where the differences between defense [sic] and attack have become blurred” (17). According to the Home Security Precautions, New South Wales, October 1999 report conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 47% of NSW dwellings were ‘secure’ (meaning that they either had a burglar alarm, or all entry points were secured or they were inside a security block) while only 9% of NSW households had no home security devices present (Smith 3). In a similar report for Western Australia conducted in October 2004, an estimated 71% of WA households had window security of some sort (screens, locks or shutters) while 67% had deadlocks on at least one external door (4). An estimated 27% had a security alarm installed while almost half (49%) had sensor lights (Hubbard 4-5). This growing sense of insecurity means big business for those selling security products and services. By the end of June 1999, there were 1,714 businesses in Australia’s security services industry generating $1,395 million of income during 1998-99 financial year (McLennan 3; see also Macken). This survey did not include locksmith services or the companies dealing with alarm manufacturing, wholesaling or installing. While Colomina’s article focuses on the “war with weather” and the attempts to control environmental conditions inside the home through what she calls “counterdomesticity” (20), her conceptualisation of the house as a “military weapon” (17) provides a useful tool for thinking the relation between the home, architecture and security. Conceiving of the house as a military weapon might seem like a stretch, but we should recall that the rhetoric of war has already leaked into the everyday. One hears of the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on crime’ in the media. ‘War’ is the everyday condition of our urban jungles (see also Diken and Lausten) and in order to survive, let alone feel secure, one must be able to defend one’s family and home. Take, for example, Signal Security’s website. One finds a panel on the left-hand side of the screen to all webpages devoted to “Residential Products”. Two circular images are used in the panel with one photograph overlapping the other. In the top circle, a white nuclear family (stereotypical mum, dad and two kids), dressed in pristine white clothing bare their white teeth to the internet surfer. Underneath this photo is another photograph in which an arm clad in a black leather jacket emerges through a smashed window. In the foreground a black-gloved hand manipulates a lock, while a black balaclava masks an unrecognisable face through the broken glass. The effect of their proximity produces a violent juxtaposition in which the burglar visually intrudes on the family’s domestic bliss. The panel stages a struggle between white and black, good and bad, family and individual, security and insecurity, recognisability and unidentifiability. It thus codifies the loving, knowable family as the domestic space of security against the selfish, unidentifiable intruder (presumed not to have a family) as the primary reason for insecurity in the family home – and no doubt to inspire the consumption of security products. Advertisements of security products thus articulate the family home as a fragile innocence constantly vulnerable from the outside. From a feminist perspective, this image of the family goes against the findings of the National Homicide Monitoring Program, which shows that 57% of the women killed in Australia between 2004 and 2005 were killed by an intimate partner while 17% were killed by a family member (Mouzos and Houliaras 20). If, on the one hand, the family home is targeted by criminals, on the other, it has emerged as a primary site for security advertising eager to exploit the growing sense of insecurity – the family as a target market. The military concepts of ‘target’ and ‘targeting’ have shifted into the benign discourse of strategic advertising. As Dora Epstein writes, “We arm our buildings to arm ourselves from the intrusion of a public fluidity, and thus our buildings, our architectures of fortification, send a very clear message: ‘avoid this place or protect yourself’” (1997: 139). Epstein’s reference to ‘architectures of fortification’ reminds us that the desire to create security through the built environment has a long history. Nan Ellin has argued that fear’s physical manifestation can be found in the formation of towns from antiquity to the Renaissance. In this sense, towns and cities are always already a response to the fear of foreign invaders (Ellin 13; see also Diken and Lausten 291). This fear of the outsider is most obviously manifested in the creation of physical walls. Yet fortification is also an effect of spatial allusions produced by the configuration of space, as exemplified in Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s semiotic reading of a suburban Australian display home without a fence. While the lack of a fence might suggest openness, they suggest that the manicured lawn is flat so “that eyes can pass easily over it – and smooth – so that feet will not presume to” (30). Since the front garden is best viewed from the street it is clearly a message for the outside, but it also signifies “private property” (30). Space is both organised and lived, in such a way that it becomes a medium of communication to passers-by and would-be intruders. What emerges in this semiotic reading is a way of thinking about space as defensible, as organised in a way that space can begin to defend itself. The Problematic of Defensible Space The incorporation of military architecture into civil architecture is most evident in home security. By security I mean the material systems (from locks to electronic alarms) and precautionary practices (locking the door) used to protect spaces, both of which are enabled by a way of imagining space in terms of risk and vulnerability. I read Oscar Newman’s 1972 Defensible Space as outlining the problematic of spatial security. Indeed, it was around that period that the problematic of crime prevention through urban design received increasing attention in Western architectural discourse (see Jeffery). Newman’s book examines how spaces can be used to reinforce human control over residential environments, producing what he calls ‘defensible space.’ In Newman’s definition, defensible space is a model for residential environments which inhibits crime by creating the physical expression of a social fabric that defends itself. All the different elements which combine to make a defensible space have a common goal – an environment in which latent territoriality and sense of community in the inhabitants can be translated into responsibility for ensuring a safe, productive, and well-maintained living space (3). Through clever design space begins to defend itself. I read Newman’s book as presenting the contemporary problematic of spatialised security: how to structure space so as to increase control; how to organise architecture so as to foster territorialism; how to encourage territorial control through amplifying surveillance. The production of defensible space entails moving away from what he calls the ‘compositional approach’ to architecture, which sees buildings as separate from their environments, and the ‘organic approach’ to architecture, in which the building and its grounds are organically interrelated (Newman 60). In this approach Newman proposes a number of changes to space: firstly, spaces need to be multiplied (one no longer has a simple public/private binary, but also semi-private and semi-public spaces); secondly, these spaces must be hierarchised (moving from public to semi-public to semi-private to private); thirdly, within this hierarchy spaces can also be striated using symbolic or material boundaries between the different types of spaces. Furthermore, spaces must be designed to increase surveillance: use smaller corridors serving smaller sets of families (69-71); incorporate amenities in “defined zones of influence” (70); use L-shaped buildings as opposed to rectangles (84); use windows on the sides of buildings to reveal the fire escape from outside (90). As he puts it, the subdivision of housing projects into “small, recognisable and comprehensible-at-a-glance enclaves is a further contributor to improving the visual surveillance mechanism” (1000). Finally, Newman lays out the principle of spatial juxtaposition: consider the building/street interface (positioning of doors and windows to maximise surveillance); consider building/building interface (e.g. build residential apartments next to ‘safer’ commercial, industrial, institutional and entertainment facilities) (109-12). In short, Newman’s book effectively redefines residential space in terms of territorial zones of control. Such zones of influence are the products of the interaction between architectural forms and environment, which are not reducible to the intent of the architect (68). Thus, in attempting to respond to the exigencies of the moment – the problem of urban crime, the cost of housing – Newman maps out residential space in what Foucault might have called a ‘micro-physics of power’. During the mid-1970s through to the 1980s a number of publications aimed at the average householder are printed in the UK and Australia. Apart from trade publishing (Bunting), The UK Design Council released two small publications (Barty, White and Burall; Design Council) while in Australia the Department of Housing and Construction released a home safety publication, which contained a small section on security, and the Australian Institute of Criminology published a small volume entitled Designing out Crime: Crime prevention through environmental design (Geason and Wilson). While Newman emphasised the responsibility of architects and urban planners, in these publications the general concerns of defensible space are relocated in the ‘average homeowner’. Citing crime statistics on burglary and vandalism, these publications incite their readers to take action, turning the homeowner into a citizen-soldier. The householder, whether he likes it or not, is already in a struggle. The urban jungle must be understood in terms of “the principles of warfare” (Bunting 7), in which everyday homes become bodies needing protection through suitable architectural armour. Through a series of maps and drawings and statistics, the average residential home is transformed into a series of points of vulnerability. Home space is re-inscribed as a series of points of entry/access and lines of sight. Simultaneously, through lists of ‘dos and don’ts’ a set of precautionary behaviours is inculcated into the readers. Principles of security begin codifying the home space, disciplining the spatial practices of the intimate, regulating the access and mobility of the family and guests. The Architectural Nervous System Nowadays we see a wild, almost excessive, proliferation of security products available to the ‘security conscious homeowner’. We are no longer simply dealing with security devices designed to block – such as locks, bolts and fasteners. The electronic revolution has aided the production of security devices that are increasingly more specialised and more difficult to manipulate, which paradoxically makes it more difficult for the security consumer to understand. Detection systems now include continuous wiring, knock-out bars, vibration detectors, breaking glass detectors, pressure mats, underground pressure detectors and fibre optic signalling. Audible alarm systems have been upgraded to wire-free intruder alarms, visual alarms, telephone warning devices, access control and closed circuit television and are supported by uninterruptible power supplies and control panels (see Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers 19-39). The whole house is literally re-routed as a series of relays in an electronic grid. If the house as a security risk is defined in terms of points of vulnerability, alarm systems take these points as potential points of contact. Relays running through floors, doors and windows can be triggered by pressure, sound or dislocation. We see a proliferation of sensors: switching sensors, infra-red sensors, ultrasonic sensors, microwave radar sensors, microwave fence sensors and microphonic sensors (see Walker). The increasing diversification of security products attests to the sheer scale of these architectural/engineering changes to our everyday architecture. In our fear of crime we have produced increasingly more complex security products for the home, thus complexifying the spaces we somehow inherently feel should be ‘simple’. I suggest that whereas previous devices merely reinforced certain architectural or engineering aspects of the home, contemporary security products actually constitute the home as a feeling, architectural body capable of being affected. This recalls notions of a sensuous architecture and bodily metaphors within architectural discourse (see Thomsen; Puglini). It is not simply our fears that lead us to secure our homes through technology, but through our fears we come to invest our housing architecture with a nervous system capable of fearing for itself. Our eyes and ears become detection systems while our screams are echoed in building alarms. Body organs are deterritorialised from the human body and reterritorialised on contemporary residential architecture, while our senses are extended through modern security technologies. The vulnerable body of the family home has become a feeling body conscious of its own vulnerability. It is less about the physical expression of fear, as Nan Ellin has put it, than about how building materialities become capable of fearing for themselves. What we have now are residential houses that are capable of being more fully mobilised in this urban war. Family homes become bodies that scan the darkness for the slightest movements, bodies that scream at the slightest possibility of danger. They are bodies that whisper to each other: a house can recognise an intrusion and relay a warning to a security station, informing security personnel without the occupants of that house knowing. They are the newly produced victims of an urban war. Our homes are the event-spaces in which mediated fear unfolds into an architectural nervous system. If media plug our homes into one set of relations between ideologies, representations and fear, then the architectural nervous system plugs that back into a different set of relations between capital, fear and the electronic grid. The home is less an endpoint of broadcast media than a node in an electronic network, a larger nervous system that encompasses the globe. It is a network that plugs architectural nervous systems into city electronic grids into mediated subjectivities into military technologies and back again, allowing fear to be disseminated and extended, replayed and spliced into the most banal aspects of our domestic lives. References Barty, Euan, David White, and Paul Burall. Safety and Security in the Home. London: The Design Council, 1980. Blunt, Alison, and Ann Varley. “Introduction: Geographies of Home.” Cultural Geographies 11.1 (2004): 3-6. Bunting, James. The Protection of Property against Crime. Folkestone: Bailey Brothers & Sinfen, 1975. Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers. Security Engineering. London: CIBSE, 1991. Colomina, Beatriz. “Domesticity at War.” Assemblage 16 (1991): 14-41. Department of Housing and Construction. Safety in and around the Home. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1981. Design Council. The Design Centre Guide to Domestic Safety and Security. London: Design Council, 1976. Diken, Bülent, and Carsten Bagge Lausten. “Zones of Indistinction: Security and Terror, and Bare Life.” Space and Culture 5.3 (2002): 290-307. Ellin, Nan. “Shelter from the Storm or Form Follows Fear and Vice Versa.” Architecture of Fear. Ed. Nan Ellin. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Epstein, Dora. “Abject Terror: A Story of Fear, Sex, and Architecture.” Architecture of Fear. Ed. Nan Ellin. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Geason, Susan, and Paul Wilson. Designing Out Crime: Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989. Hubbard, Alan. Home Safety and Security, Western Australia. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005. Jeffery, C. Ray. Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1971. Macken, Julie. “Why Aren’t We Happier?” Australian Financial Review 26 Nov. 1999: 26. Mallory, Keith, and Arvid Ottar. Architecture of Aggression: A History of Military Architecture in North West Europe, 1900-1945. Hampshire: Architectural Press, 1973. Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. McLennan, W. Security Services, Australia, 1998-99. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Mouzos, Jenny, and Tina Houliaras. Homicide in Australia: 2004-05 National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP) Annual Report. Research and Public Policy Series 72. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2006. Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design. New York: Collier, 1973. Puglini, Luigi. HyperArchitecture: Space in the Electronic Age. Basel: Bikhäuser, 1999. Signal Security. 13 January 2007 http://www.signalsecurity.com.au/securitysystems.htm>. Smith, Geoff. Home Security Precautions, New South Wales, October 1999. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000. Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Thomsen, Christian W. Sensuous Architecture: The Art of Erotic Building. Munich and New York: Prestel, 1998. Walker, Philip. Electronic Security Systems: Better Ways to Crime Prevention. London: Butterworths, 1983. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger. Eds. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Caluya, Gilbert. "The Architectural Nervous System: Home, Fear, Insecurity." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/05-caluya.php>. APA Style Caluya, G. (Aug. 2007) "The Architectural Nervous System: Home, Fear, Insecurity," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/05-caluya.php>.

To sin by silence, when we should protest,Makes cowards out of men.— Ella Wheeler WilcoxProtest is culturally entwined in historical and juro-political realities and is a fundamental element of the exercise of individual and collective rights. As our title notes, while there are currently many ‘protests in progress’ around the world, there is also a great deal of ‘progress in protest’ in terms of what protests look like, their scale and number, how they are formed and conducted, their goals, how they can be studied, as well as the varying responses formed in relation to protest. The etymology of protest associates two important dynamics pertaining to the topic. Firstly, a protest is something that is put forward, forth, or toward the front (from the Latin pro); essentially, it is in one manner or another, made publically. Secondly, it suggests that a person or persons have beared witness (testis) and instead of remaining silent, have made a declaration or assertion (testari). In other words, someone has made public their disapproval or objection. The nine articles that comprise this issue of M/C Journal on ‘protest’ reminds us of these salient elements of protest. Each, in their own way, highlight the importance of not remaining silent when faced with an injustice or in order to promote social change. As Bill McKibben (7) outlines in his foreword to an excellent collection of protest documents, ‘voices of protest ... are often precisely what propels human civilisation forward and allows it to become unstuck’. However, not all forms of contemporary protest shares ideological or progressive aims. Here, we might consider the emergence of contentious formations such as the alt-right and antifa, what is considered ‘fake’ or ‘real’, and ongoing conflicts between notions of individual and collective rights and state sovereignty.This modest but insightful collection demonstrates the broad scope of this field of inquiry. This issue explores the intersections among social justice, identity and communications technology, as well as the convergences and divergences in the form, function and substance of protest. Through an analysis of protest’s relationship to media, the author’s highlight the possibilities of protest to effect social change. The issue begins with Lakota screenwriter and activist Floris White Bull’s (Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká) discussion of the documentary AWAKE, a Dream from Standing Rock (2017) and the #NODAPL protest. The film, split into three parts, takes a poignant and quite personal look at the native-led peaceful resistance at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. This protest involved tens of thousands of activists from all over the world who opposed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which was to transport fracked oil directly underneath the Missouri River and through sovereign Lakota land (see Image 1). However, the events at Standing Rock were not a single-issue protest and brought activists together over a range of interrelated issues including environmental protection, human rights, water security, community health and Native American sovereignty. The Water Protectors were also forced to contest racist and disparaging media representations. As such, Standing Rock remains a site of cultural exchange and learning. These protests are not historical, but instead, are an ongoing struggle. The film AWAKE is important as testimony to the injustices at Standing Rock. A short description of the film is first provided in order to provide some additional context to perspectives addressed in the film. From there, White Bull has been invited to respond to questions posed by the editors regarding the Standing Rock Protests and documentary films such as AWAKE. As an Indigenous person fighting for justice, White Bull reminds readers that ‘[t]he path forward is the same as it has always been – holding on to our goals, values and dignity with resilience’.Image 1: Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, 2016. Photo credit: Indigenous Environmental Network.Cat Pausé and Sandra Grey use an example of fat shaming to investigate how media impacts body politics and determines who is enfranchised to voice public dissent. Media becomes a mechanism for policing and governing bodily norms and gendered identities. As well as outlining a brief history of feminist body activism, the authors draw on personal experience and interview material with activists to reflect on fat embodiment and politics. Also informed by intersectional approaches, their work alerts us to the diverse vectors by which injustice and oppression fall on some bodies differently as well as the diverse bodies assembled in any crowd.Greg Watson suggests that “[c]ontemporary societies are increasingly becoming sites in which it is more difficult for people to respectfully negotiate disagreements about human diversity”. Drawing on his experiences organising Human Libraries throughout Australia, Watson argues these spaces create opportunities for engaging with difference. In this sense Human Libraries can be considered sites which protest the micropublics’ “codes of civility” which produce everyday marginalisations of difference.Micropolitics and creative forms of protest are also central to Ella Cutler, Jacqueline Gothe, and Alexandra Crosby’s article. The author’s consider three design projects which seek to facilitate ethical communication with diverse communities. Drawing on Guy Julier’s tactics for activist design, each project demonstrates the value of slowing down in order to pay attention to experience. In this way, research through design offers a reflexive means for engaging social change.Research practices are also central to making visible community resistance. Anthony McCosker and Timothy Graham consider the role of social networking in urban protests through the campaign to save the iconic Melbourne music venue The Palace (see Image 2). Their article considers the value of social media data and analytics in relation to the court proceedings and trial processes. Given the centrality of social media to activist campaigns their reflections provide a timely evaluation of how data publics are constituted and their ongoing legacy.Image 2: Melbourne’s Palace Theatre before demolition. Photo Credit: Melbourne Heritage Action.For Marcelina Piotrowski pleasure is central to understanding data production and protest. She draws on a Deleuze and Guattarian framework in order to consider protests against oil pipelines in British Columbia. Importantly, through this theoretical framework of ‘data desires’, pleasure is not something owned by the individual subject but rather holds the potential to construct generative social collectivities. This is traced through three different practices: deliberation in online forums; citizen science and social media campaigns. This has important implications for understanding environmental issues and our own enfolding within them. Nadine Kozak takes a look at how Online Service Providers (OSPs) have historically used internet ‘blackouts’ in order to protest United States government regulations. Kozak points to protests against the Communications Decency Act (1996) which sought to regulate online pornographic material and the Stop Online Piracy Act (2011) which proposed increased federal government power to take action against online copyright infringement. Recently, the United States Congress recently passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which hold OSPs liable for third-party content including advertising for prostitution. However, despite condemnation from the Department of Justice and trafficking victims, OSPs did not utilise blackouts as a means to protest these new measures. Kozak concludes that the decision to whether or not to utilise blackout protests is dependent on the interests of technology companies and large OSPs. It is evident that most especially since Donald Trump popularised the term, ‘fake news’ has taken a centre stage in discussions concerning media. In fact, the lines between what is fake and what is official have become blurred. Most recently, QAnon proponents have been attending Trump rallies and speeches giving further visibility to various conspiracy narratives stemming from online message boards (see Image 3). Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, and Daniel Bach establishe a clear timeline of events in order to trace the origins of ‘#Pizzagate’; a 2016 conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party were connected with human trafficking and an alleged child-sex ring. The authors investigate the affordances of 4chan to unpack how the site’s anonymity, rapid temporality and user collectivisation were instrumental in creating ‘bullshit’; a usage which the authors suggest is a “technical term for persuasive speech unconcerned with veracity”. This provides an understanding of how alt-right communities are assembled and motivated in a post-truth society. Image 3: QAnon proponents at Trump rally in Tampa, 31 July 2018. Photo credit: Kirby Wilson, Tampa Bay Times.Finally, Colin Salter analyses protests for animal rights as a lens to critique notions of national identity and belonging. Protests on whaling in the Southern Ocean (see Image 4) and live export trade from Australia continue to be highly contested political issues. Salter reflects on the ABC’s 2011 exposé into Australian live animal exports to Indonesia and the 2014 hearings at the International Court of Justice into Japanese whaling. Salter then traces the common elements between animal rights campaigns in order to demonstrate the manner in which the physical bodies of animals, their treatment, and the debate surrounding that treatment become sites for mapping cultural identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Here, Salter suggests that such inquiry is useful for promoting broader consideration of efficacious approaches to animal advocacy and social change.Image 4: The ship Bob Barker, rammed by the Japanese whaling vessel Nishin Maru. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd Facebook Page. As indicated in the opening paragraphs, it is crucial for people committed to social justice to publically raise their voices in protest. As such, we would like to thank each of the authors for their important contributions to this issue on ‘protest’. In its own way, each contribution serves doubly as a form of protest and a means to understand the topic more clearly. There is solidarity evidenced in this issue. Taken as a whole, these articles attest to the importance of understanding protest and social change.ReferencesMcKibben, B. "Foreword." Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent. Eds. Frank Lowenstein, Sheryl Lechner, and Erik Bruun. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2007. 7-8.Wilcox, E.W. "Protest." Poems of Problems. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1914.

Introduction Figure 1 The counter-Terrorism advertising campaign of London’s Metropolitan Police commodifies some everyday items such as mobile phones, computers, passports and credit cards as having the potential to sustain terrorist activities. The process of ascribing cultural values and symbolic meanings to some everyday technical gadgets objectifies and situates Terrorism into the everyday life. The police, in urging people to look out for ‘the unusual’ in their normal day-to-day lives, juxtapose the everyday with the unusual, where day-to-day consumption, routines and flows of human activity can seemingly house insidious and atavistic elements. This again is reiterated in the Met police press release: Terrorists live within our communities making their plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and trying not to raise suspicions about their activities. (MPA Website) The commodification of Terrorism through uncommon and everyday objects situates Terrorism as a phenomenon which occupies a liminal space within the everyday. It resides, breathes and co-exists within the taken-for-granted routines and objects of ‘the everyday’ where it has the potential to explode and disrupt without warning. Since 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings Terrorism has been narrated through the disruption of mobility, whether in mid-air or in the deep recesses of the Underground. The resonant thread of disruption to human mobility evokes a powerful meta-narrative where acts of Terrorism can halt human agency amidst the backdrop of the metropolis, which is often a metaphor for speed and accelerated activities. If globalisation and the interconnected nature of the world are understood through discourses of risk, Terrorism bears the same footprint in urban spaces of modernity, narrating the vulnerability of the human condition in an inter-linked world where ideological struggles and resistance are manifested through inexplicable violence and destruction of lives, where the everyday is suspended to embrace the unexpected. As a consequence ambient fear “saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (Hubbard 2). The commodification of Terrorism through everyday items of consumption inevitably creates an intertextuality with real and media events, which constantly corrode the security of the metropolis. Paddy Scannell alludes to a doubling of place in our mediated world where “public events now occur simultaneously in two different places; the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. The media then vacillates between the two sites and creates experiences of simultaneity, liveness and immediacy” (qtd. in Moores 22). The doubling of place through media constructs a pervasive environment of risk and fear. Mark Danner (qtd. in Bauman 106) points out that the most powerful weapon of the 9/11 terrorists was that innocuous and “most American of technological creations: the television set” which provided a global platform to constantly replay and remember the dreadful scenes of the day, enabling the terrorist to appear invincible and to narrate fear as ubiquitous and omnipresent. Philip Abrams argues that ‘big events’ (such as 9/11 and 7/7) do make a difference in the social world for such events function as a transformative device between the past and future, forcing society to alter or transform its perspectives. David Altheide points out that since September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, a new discourse of Terrorism has emerged as a way of expressing how the world has changed and defining a state of constant alert through a media logic and format that shapes the nature of discourse itself. Consequently, the intensity and centralisation of surveillance in Western countries increased dramatically, placing the emphasis on expanding the forms of the already existing range of surveillance processes and practices that circumscribe and help shape our social existence (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Normalisation of Surveillance The role of technologies, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other infrastructures to unevenly distribute access to the goods and services necessary for modern life, while facilitating data collection on and control of the public, are significant characteristics of modernity (Reiman; Graham and Marvin; Monahan). The embedding of technological surveillance into spaces and infrastructures not only augment social control but also redefine data as a form of capital which can be shared between public and private sectors (Gandy, Data Mining; O’Harrow; Monahan). The scale, complexity and limitations of omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, nevertheless, offer room for both subversion as well as new forms of domination and oppression (Marx). In surveillance studies, Foucault’s analysis is often heavily employed to explain lines of continuity and change between earlier forms of surveillance and data assemblage and contemporary forms in the shape of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance modes (Dee). It establishes the need to discern patterns of power and normalisation and the subliminal or obvious cultural codes and categories that emerge through these arrangements (Fopp; Lyon, Electronic; Norris and Armstrong). In their study of CCTV surveillance, Norris and Armstrong (cf. in Dee) point out that when added to the daily minutiae of surveillance, CCTV cameras in public spaces, along with other camera surveillance in work places, capture human beings on a database constantly. The normalisation of surveillance, particularly with reference to CCTV, the popularisation of surveillance through television formats such as ‘Big Brother’ (Dee), and the expansion of online platforms to publish private images, has created a contradictory, complex and contested nature of spatial and power relationships in society. The UK, for example, has the most developed system of both urban and public space cameras in the world and this growth of camera surveillance and, as Lyon (Surveillance) points out, this has been achieved with very little, if any, public debate as to their benefits or otherwise. There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (cf. Lyon, Surveillance). That is one for every fourteen people and a person can be captured on over 300 cameras every day. An estimated £500m of public money has been invested in CCTV infrastructure over the last decade but, according to a Home Office study, CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels (Wood and Ball). In spatial terms, these statistics reiterate Foucault’s emphasis on the power economy of the unseen gaze. Michel Foucault in analysing the links between power, information and surveillance inspired by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, indicated that it is possible to sanction or reward an individual through the act of surveillance without their knowledge (155). It is this unseen and unknown gaze of surveillance that is fundamental to the exercise of power. The design and arrangement of buildings can be engineered so that the “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Lyon (Terrorism), in tracing the trajectory of surveillance studies, points out that much of surveillance literature has focused on understanding it as a centralised bureaucratic relationship between the powerful and the governed. Invisible forms of surveillance have also been viewed as a class weapon in some societies. With the advancements in and proliferation of surveillance technologies as well as convergence with other technologies, Lyon argues that it is no longer feasible to view surveillance as a linear or centralised process. In our contemporary globalised world, there is a need to reconcile the dialectical strands that mediate surveillance as a process. In acknowledging this, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have constructed surveillance as a rhizome that defies linearity to appropriate a more convoluted and malleable form where the coding of bodies and data can be enmeshed to produce intricate power relationships and hierarchies within societies. Latour draws on the notion of assemblage by propounding that data is amalgamated from scattered centres of calculation where these can range from state and commercial institutions to scientific laboratories which scrutinise data to conceive governance and control strategies. Both the Latourian and Deleuzian ideas of surveillance highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organisations that become connected to make “surveillance assemblages” in contrast to the static, unidirectional Panopticon metaphor (Ball, “Organization” 93). In a similar vein, Gandy (Panoptic) infers that it is misleading to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalising as the Panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Co-optation of Millions The Metropolitan Police’s counter-Terrorism strategy seeks to co-opt millions where the corporeal body can complement the landscape of technological surveillance that already co-exists within modernity. In its press release, the role of civilian bodies in ensuring security of the city is stressed; Keeping Londoners safe from Terrorism is not a job solely for governments, security services or police. If we are to make London the safest major city in the world, we must mobilise against Terrorism not only the resources of the state, but also the active support of the millions of people who live and work in the capita. (MPA Website). Surveillance is increasingly simulated through the millions of corporeal entities where seeing in advance is the goal even before technology records and codes these images (William). Bodies understand and code risk and images through the cultural narratives which circulate in society. Compared to CCTV technology images, which require cultural and political interpretations and interventions, bodies as surveillance organisms implicitly code other bodies and activities. The travel bag in the Metropolitan Police poster reinforces the images of the 7/7 bombers and the renewed attempts to bomb the London Underground on the 21st of July. It reiterates the CCTV footage revealing images of the bombers wearing rucksacks. The image of the rucksack both embodies the everyday as well as the potential for evil in everyday objects. It also inevitably reproduces the cultural biases and prejudices where the rucksack is subliminally associated with a specific type of body. The rucksack in these terms is a laden image which symbolically captures the context and culture of risk discourses in society. The co-optation of the population as a surveillance entity also recasts new forms of social responsibility within the democratic polity, where privacy is increasingly mediated by the greater need to monitor, trace and record the activities of one another. Nikolas Rose, in discussing the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals in modern societies, describes the process in which the individual accepts responsibility for personal actions across a wide range of fields of social and economic activity as in the choice of diet, savings and pension arrangements, health care decisions and choices, home security measures and personal investment choices (qtd. in Dee). While surveillance in individualistic terms is often viewed as a threat to privacy, Rose argues that the state of ‘advanced liberalism’ within modernity and post-modernity requires considerable degrees of self-governance, regulation and surveillance whereby the individual is constructed both as a ‘new citizen’ and a key site of self management. By co-opting and recasting the role of the citizen in the age of Terrorism, the citizen to a degree accepts responsibility for both surveillance and security. In our sociological imagination the body is constructed both as lived as well as a social object. Erving Goffman uses the word ‘umwelt’ to stress that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world. Goffman defines ‘umwelt’ as “the region around an individual from which signs of alarm can come” and employs it to capture how people as social actors perceive and manage their settings when interacting in public places (252). Goffman’s ‘umwelt’ can be traced to Immanuel Kant’s idea that it is the a priori categories of space and time that make it possible for a subject to perceive a world (Umiker-Sebeok; qtd. in Ball, “Organization”). Anthony Giddens adapted the term Umwelt to refer to “a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms which then formed a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves” (244). Benjamin Smith, in considering the body as an integral component of the link between our consciousness and our material world, observes that the body is continuously inscribed by culture. These inscriptions, he argues, encompass a wide range of cultural practices and will imply knowledge of a variety of social constructs. The inscribing of the body will produce cultural meanings as well as create forms of subjectivity while locating and situating the body within a cultural matrix (Smith). Drawing on Derrida’s work, Pugliese employs the term ‘Somatechnics’ to conceptualise the body as a culturally intelligible construct and to address the techniques in and through which the body is formed and transformed (qtd. in Osuri). These techniques can encompass signification systems such as race and gender and equally technologies which mediate our sense of reality. These technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualising and positioning produce the very conditions for the cultural intelligibility of the body (Osuri). The body is then continuously inscribed and interpreted through mediated signifying systems. Similarly, Hayles, while not intending to impose a Cartesian dichotomy between the physical body and its cognitive presence, contends that the use and interactions with technology incorporate the body as a material entity but it also equally inscribes it by marking, recording and tracing its actions in various terrains. According to Gayatri Spivak (qtd. in Ball, “Organization”) new habits and experiences are embedded into the corporeal entity which then mediates its reactions and responses to the social world. This means one’s body is not completely one’s own and the presence of ideological forces or influences then inscribe the body with meanings, codes and cultural values. In our modern condition, the body and data are intimately and intricately bound. Outside the home, it is difficult for the body to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic personal data (Stalder). According to Felix Stalder our physical bodies are shadowed by a ‘data body’ which follows the physical body of the consuming citizen and sometimes precedes it by constructing the individual through data (12). Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, the citizen will be treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Gandy, Panoptic; William). Following September 11, Lyon (Terrorism) reveals that surveillance data from a myriad of sources, such as supermarkets, motels, traffic control points, credit card transactions records and so on, was used to trace the activities of terrorists in the days and hours before their attacks, confirming that the body leaves data traces and trails. Surveillance works by abstracting bodies from places and splitting them into flows to be reassembled as virtual data-doubles, and in the process can replicate hierarchies and centralise power (Lyon, Terrorism). Mike Dee points out that the nature of surveillance taking place in modern societies is complex and far-reaching and in many ways insidious as surveillance needs to be situated within the broadest context of everyday human acts whether it is shopping with loyalty cards or paying utility bills. Physical vulnerability of the body becomes more complex in the time-space distanciated surveillance systems to which the body has become increasingly exposed. As such, each transaction – whether it be a phone call, credit card transaction, or Internet search – leaves a ‘data trail’ linkable to an individual person or place. Haggerty and Ericson, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, describe the convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and multiple levels (qtd. in Hier). They argue that the target of the generic ‘surveillance assemblage’ is the human body, which is broken into a series of data flows on which surveillance process is based. The thrust of the focus is the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute. These are then reapplied to the body. In this sense, surveillance is rhizomatic for it is diverse and connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts (Ball, “Elements”). The co-opted body in the schema of counter-Terrorism enters a power arrangement where it constitutes both the unseen gaze as well as the data that will be implicated and captured in this arrangement. It is capable of producing surveillance data for those in power while creating new data through its transactions and movements in its everyday life. The body is unequivocally constructed through this data and is also entrapped by it in terms of representation and categorisation. The corporeal body is therefore part of the machinery of surveillance while being vulnerable to its discriminatory powers of categorisation and victimisation. As Hannah Arendt (qtd. in Bauman 91) had warned, “we terrestrial creatures bidding for cosmic significance will shortly be unable to comprehend and articulate the things we are capable of doing” Arendt’s caution conveys the complexity, vulnerability as well as the complicity of the human condition in the surveillance society. Equally it exemplifies how the corporeal body can be co-opted as a surveillance entity sustaining a new ‘banality’ (Arendt) in the machinery of surveillance. Social Consequences of Surveillance Lyon (Terrorism) observed that the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK have inevitably become a prism through which aspects of social structure and processes may be viewed. This prism helps to illuminate the already existing vast range of surveillance practices and processes that touch everyday life in so-called information societies. As Lyon (Terrorism) points out surveillance is always ambiguous and can encompass genuine benefits and plausible rationales as well as palpable disadvantages. There are elements of representation to consider in terms of how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another technological medium, and these representations bring different meanings and enable different interpretations of life and surveillance (Ball, “Elements”). As such surveillance needs to be viewed in a number of ways: practice, knowledge and protection from threat. As data can be manipulated and interpreted according to cultural values and norms it reflects the inevitability of power relations to forge its identity in a surveillance society. In this sense, Ball (“Elements”) concludes surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. She refers to actors within the surveilled domain as ‘intermediaries’, where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together to sometimes distort as well as reiterate patterns of hegemony (“Elements” 93). While surveillance is often connected with technology, it does not however determine nor decide how we code or employ our data. New technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality for they become enmeshed in complex pre-existing power and value systems (Marx). With surveillance there is an emphasis on the classificatory powers in our contemporary world “as persons and groups are often risk-profiled in the commercial sphere which rates their social contributions and sorts them into systems” (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Lyon (Terrorism) contends that the surveillance society is one that is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances (Wood and Ball). The emergence of pervasive, automated and discriminatory mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising constitute a significant mechanism for reproducing and reinforcing social, economic and cultural divisions in information societies. Such automated categorisation, Lyon (Terrorism) warns, has consequences for everyone especially in face of the new anti-terror measures enacted after September 11. In tandem with this, Bauman points out that a few suicidal murderers on the loose will be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the “usual suspects”. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be reprocessed into the attributes of a “category”; a category easily recognisable by, for instance, a suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack* *the kind of object which CCTV cameras are designed to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities on the London Underground, the volume of incidents classified as “racist attacks” rose sharply around the country. (122; emphasis added) Bauman, drawing on Lyon, asserts that the understandable desire for security combined with the pressure to adopt different kind of systems “will create a culture of control that will colonise more areas of life with or without the consent of the citizen” (123). This means that the inhabitants of the urban space whether a citizen, worker or consumer who has no terrorist ambitions whatsoever will discover that their opportunities are more circumscribed by the subject positions or categories which are imposed on them. Bauman cautions that for some these categories may be extremely prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background (124). Joseph Pugliese, in linking visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of 7/7 bombings in London, suggests that the discursive relations of power and visuality are inextricably bound. Pugliese argues that racial profiling creates a regime of visuality which fundamentally inscribes our physiology of perceptions with stereotypical images. He applies this analogy to Menzes running down the platform in which the retina transforms him into the “hallucinogenic figure of an Asian Terrorist” (Pugliese 8). With globalisation and the proliferation of ICTs, borders and boundaries are no longer sacrosanct and as such risks are managed by enacting ‘smart borders’ through new technologies, with huge databases behind the scenes processing information about individuals and their journeys through the profiling of body parts with, for example, iris scans (Wood and Ball 31). Such body profiling technologies are used to create watch lists of dangerous passengers or identity groups who might be of greater ‘risk’. The body in a surveillance society can be dissected into parts and profiled and coded through technology. These disparate codings of body parts can be assembled (or selectively omitted) to construct and represent whole bodies in our information society to ascertain risk. The selection and circulation of knowledge will also determine who gets slotted into the various categories that a surveillance society creates. Conclusion When the corporeal body is subsumed into a web of surveillance it often raises questions about the deterministic nature of technology. The question is a long-standing one in our modern consciousness. We are apprehensive about according technology too much power and yet it is implicated in the contemporary power relationships where it is suspended amidst human motive, agency and anxiety. The emergence of surveillance societies, the co-optation of bodies in surveillance schemas, as well as the construction of the body through data in everyday transactions, conveys both the vulnerabilities of the human condition as well as its complicity in maintaining the power arrangements in society. Bauman, in citing Jacques Ellul and Hannah Arendt, points out that we suffer a ‘moral lag’ in so far as technology and society are concerned, for often we ruminate on the consequences of our actions and motives only as afterthoughts without realising at this point of existence that the “actions we take are most commonly prompted by the resources (including technology) at our disposal” (91). References Abrams, Philip. Historical Sociology. Shepton Mallet, UK: Open Books, 1982. Altheide, David. “Consuming Terrorism.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 289-308. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Fear. 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There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. 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