law enforcement

Book review – Future Sea: How to Rescue and Protect the World’s Oceans

7-minute read

In his book Half-Earth, the famous biologist E.O. Wilson proposed setting aside half of the planet’s surface for conservation purposes. Deborah Rowan Wright will do you one better; given how important they are for life on the planet, how about we completely protect the oceans. What, all of it? Yes, not half, all of it. We need a gestalt shift, from “default profit and exploitation to default care and respect” (p. 11). Such a bold proposal is likely to elicit disbelief and cynicism—”Impossible!”—and Wright has experienced plenty of that. But hear her out, for sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Future Sea is a surprisingly grounded, balanced, and knowledgeable argument that swayed me because, guess what, the oceans are already protected.

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Book review – Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime

6-minute read

I have written on this blog before that the Internet is not everything it is cracked up to be. Here I will add another string to that bow: crime. Spam, scams, malware, keyloggers, viruses, hacking, identity theft, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, stolen credit card details… the list goes on. Just as its offline counterpart, cybercrime encompasses a diverse array of misdeeds. But where its victims, both personal and corporate, regularly make headlines, the perpetrators remain a mysterious bunch. Based on a huge number of interviews, sociologist Jonathan Lusthaus here provides a peek behind that veil of anonymity. Next to showing that cybercrime has become an industry like any other, he also explores the paradox at its heart: how did this growth happen in an environment of mistrust and anonymity?

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