By John Kleinig, Peter Mameli, Seumas Miller, Douglas Salane and Adina Schwartz

This study is principally concerned with the ethical dimensions of identity management technology – electronic surveillance, the mining of personal data, and profiling – in the context of transnational crime and global terrorism. The ethical challenge at the heart of this study is to establish an acceptable and sustainable equilibrium between two central moral values in contemporary liberal democracies, namely, security and privacy. Both values are essential to individual liberty, but they come into conflict in times when civil order is threatened, as has been the case from late in the twentieth century, with the advent of global terrorism and trans-national crime. We seek to articulate legally sustainable, politically possible, and technologically feasible, global ethical standards for identity management technology and policies in liberal democracies in the contemporary global security context. Although the standards in question are to be understood as global ethical standards potentially to be adopted not only by the United States, but also by the European Union, India, Australasia, and other contemporary liberal democratic states, we take as our primary focus the tensions that have arisen between the United States and the European Union.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2011. 304p.

By George W. Grayson

La Familia Michoacana burst onto the national stage on September 6, 2006, when ruffians crashed into the seedy Sol y Sombra nightclub in Uruapan, Michoacán, and fired shots into the air. They screamed at the revelers to lie down, ripped open a plastic bag, and lobbed five human heads onto the beer-stained black and white dance floor. The day before these macabre pyrotechnics, the killers seized their prey from a mechanic’s shop and hacked off their heads with bowie knives while the men writhed in pain. “You don’t do something like that unless you want to send a big message,” said a U.S. law-enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity about an act of human depravity that would “cast a pall over the darkest nooks of hell.” The desperados left behind a note hailing their act as “divine justice,” adding that: "The Family doesn't kill for money; it doesn't kill women; it doesn't kill innocent people; only those who deserve to die, die. Everyone should know . . . this is divine justice.” While claiming to do the “Lord’s work,” the ruthless leaders of this syndicate have emerged as the dominant exporter of methamphetamines to the United States, even as they control scores of municipalities in Michoacán and neighboring states.

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2010. 128p.