This thesis examines how secrecy and absence shape the representation of covert counter-terrorism in the public sphere. Contemporary covert practices, from missile strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles to special forces 'kill/capture' operations, have come to exemplify U.S. counter-terrorism in public debate. This is significant because these practices shift the ethical stakes of witnessing state warfare. Previous scholarship on war and news media has argued that public glimpses of state violence, alongside official declarations, can demonise or dehumanise the targets of such violence, and thus prompt witnesses to accept the state's rationalisation of these actions and the use of secrecy. News coverage of contemporary covert action, however, offers no such glimpses. Instead, coverage draws primarily upon residue: the rumours and debris left behind. By applying this concept of residue to drone strikes, the special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and kidnap rescue efforts in the Sahara-Sahel, the thesis argues that it is all this speculation, rubble, and empty space, rather than the state itself, which signifies to newsreaders the possibility of state secrecy. That suspicion of secrecy then frames the absences in this residue, the conspicuous lack of certain bodies and objects. Secrecy makes those absences appear suggestive, in that the latter cannot publicly corroborate different aspects of these unseen events. This allows residue to intimate – to hint at unverifiable ideas about that which is absent, in a way which can undermine more explicit claims and justifications of what has taken place. To examine how this dynamic reframes the ethics of witnessing, the thesis develops an historical affiliation, a method of linking disparate practices of violence based on similar representational qualities, in order to examine whether witnessing is being shaped by these qualities in obscured or unspoken ways. This affiliation is made between representations of covert counter-terrorism and those of lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their differences, in both cases unseen violence and absent bodies are represented as significant in their being disconnected from wider society and difficult to comprehend, to understand how and why the violence takes place. This occurs in today's counter-terrorism through hints and allusions from absence, which represent these covert events as physically intangible. As with lynching, violence and its casualties are implicitly represented in their absence as reflecting the public's intellectual and moral distance from the practice. This takes covert counter-terrorism beyond a binary of fostering assent or dissent towards the state. Instead of prompting newsreaders' complicity with state narratives for its actions, residue intimates doubts and unspoken possibilities about these events that curtail their rationalisation. Insodoing, however, these representations marginalise the violence inflicted upon casualties from ethical consideration. They do so while obscuring how that marginalisation occurs, as newsreaders are prompted to see themselves as distanced from these events and to focus upon that distance, rather than on how absences are being given significance in the public sphere. Using the historical affiliation with lynching, the thesis concludes that an ethical witnessing of covert counter-terrorism through its residue cannot be based on an attempt to recognise and 'recover' lived experiences of suffering from rumours and debris. Rather, ethical witnessing would involve an awareness of how distance is constructed through that residue, and how this gives unspoken meaning to absence.

This thesis deals with advocacy and content of the concept of advocacy, then elaborates the concepts of legal aid and legal service and looking for differences between these concepts. Thesis also offers a brief glimpse into the history of the legal profession and its evolution over the time. Furthermore, this thesis deals with the influence of the Czech Bar Association as an autonomous professional organization for practicing the legal profession and the provision of legal services by lawyers. Firstly, examines the Czech Bar Association and its organization and its jurisdiction and issuing professional rules. It also deals with other situations, which can occur under the influence of the Czech Bar Association. The thesis also outlines the basic elements of creation, content and termination of the relationship between the lawyer and his client. Individual elements of the content of the relationship attorney - client are analyzed in the fourth chapter. In particular, the duty of the lawyer to promote the rights and legitimate interests of the client's obligation not to lower the dignity of the legal profession, confidentiality, duty to inform the client and keep the documentation to be insured or the right of a lawyer to remuneration. Similarly thesis deals with the rights and obligations of the client....

Master of Science / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Melinda S. Markham / Interpersonal aspects of a relationship (i.e., equality, trust, disclosure, etc.) as they relate to finances have important implications for marital satisfaction; however, emphasis on financial transparency, “the open and honest disclosure of one’s finances,” has yet to be researched. To increase our capacity to study the role of finances in the marital relationship, the purpose of this study was to develop the Financial Transparency Scale (FTS) to assess financial transparency between married partners. A sample of 183 married individuals in their first 5 years of their first marriage completed an online survey, consisting of the FTS and four related scales. Principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted to determine the FTS is comprised of three components: financial partnership, financial secrecy, and financial trust and disclosure of the individual partner. The first component, financial partnership (eigenvalue = 10.909), consisted of 18 items and accounted for 41.96% of the variance and had a high internal reliability of (α = .95). Component 2, financial secrecy (eigenvalue = 2.845), consisted of three items and accounted for 10.94% of variance with an internal reliability of (α = .93). Component 3, financial trust and disclosure of the individual partner (eigenvalue = 1.76), consisted of five items and accounted for 6.77% of total variance with an internal reliability (α = .83). The FTS was positively correlated with four related scales: the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale, the Shared Goals and Values Scale, the Frequency of Financial Management Scale, and the Communication Patterns Questionnaire – Short Form, each of which are key behaviors of financial and marital satisfaction. The FTS will benefit financial practitioners as they can use the scale to determine the level of financial transparency between married individuals, drawing attention to areas of concern such as financial secrecy between partners. For researchers, this scale provides a measurement for a sophisticated perspective on the interpersonal factors that mediate financial transparency between married individuals.

As multimedia applications become more popular, wireless communication systems are expected to reliably provide increased data rates. Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technologies can meet this demand without using additional bandwidth or transmit power. MIMO is part of modern wireless communication standards. Another critical aspect of communications is to secure the confidentiality of data transmission. Cryptography accomplishes this at the upper layers of the protocol stack. At the physical layer, data travels unencrypted and can be secured by using the channel characteristics to ``hide'' data transmission from potential eavesdroppers. We consider a Gaussian MIMO wiretap channel and are looking for the maximal rate at which data can be transmitted both reliably and securely to the intended receiver: the secrecy capacity. This quantity is difficult to find analytically and is known precisely in only a few cases. This thesis proposes several numerical optimization methods, both stochastic and deterministic, to evaluate the secrecy capacity and to find the optimal transmit covariance matrix. The stochastic approaches are based on Monte-Carlo and on Differential Evolution (a genetic algorithm). The deterministic approaches are based on successive linear approximation. The accuracy of the results obtained with these methods is, in general, better than the one offered by popular numerical optimization tools such as CVX or YALMIP.

Secrecy is fundamental to computer security, but real systems often cannot avoid leaking some secret information. For this reason, the past decade has seen growing interest in quantitative theories of information flow that allow us to quantify the information being leaked. Within these theories, the system is modeled as an information-theoretic channel that specifies the probability of each output, given each input. Given a prior distribution on those inputs, entropy-like measures quantify the amount of information leakage caused by the channel. This thesis presents new results in the theory of min-entropy leakage. First, we study the perspective of secrecy as a resource that is gradually consumed by a system. We explore this intuition through various models of min-entropy consumption. Next, we consider several composition operators that allow smaller systems to be combined into larger systems, and explore the extent to which the leakage of a combined system is constrained by the leakage of its constituents. Most significantly, we prove upper bounds on the leakage of a cascade of two channels, where the output of the first channel is used as input to the second. In addition, we show how to decompose a channel into a cascade of channels. We also establish fundamental new results about the recently-proposed g-leakage family of measures. These results further highlight the significance of channel cascading. We prove that whenever channel A is composition refined by channel B, that is, whenever A is the cascade of B and R for some channel R, the leakage of A never exceeds that of B, regardless of the prior distribution or leakage measure (Shannon leakage, guessing entropy leakage, min-entropy leakage, or g-leakage). Moreover, we show that composition refinement is a partial order if we quotient away channel structure that is redundant with respect to leakage alone. These results are strengthened by the proof that composition refinement is the only way for one channel to never leak more than another with respect to g-leakage. Therefore, composition refinement robustly answers the question of when a channel is always at least as secure as another from a leakage point of view.

Personal data processing in banking sector within the context of banking secrecy Abstract Banking secrecy is a concept which has been intertwined with the provision of banking services since the very beginnings of this industry. Even though it is a universally known concept, its legal definition, including piercings of banking secrecy, is not comprehensive. In recent years, its form and the possibilities of piercing it have been evolving considerably due to often conflicting modern legislative trends (emphasis on consumer protection, emphasis on data processing transparency, support of client mobility in the banking sector, support of innovative financial services, sharing of data for crime prevention incl. terrorism, money laundering and tax evasion). The goal of this thesis is to present banking secrecy in a complex manner including the categories and the respective individual concrete piercings within the context of data processing legislation, including laying out interpretation problems from practice and proposing concrete solutions. Further, the thesis, where suitable, the thesis also includes proposals de lege ferenda. The thesis begins with an introduction to the subject matter and is further divided into four chapters, which are followed by a conclusion that sums up the partial conclusions made...

Personal data processing in banking sector within the context of banking secrecy Abstract Banking secrecy is a concept which has been intertwined with the provision of banking services since the very beginnings of this industry. Even though it is a universally known concept, its legal definition, including piercings of banking secrecy, is not comprehensive. In recent years, its form and the possibilities of piercing it have been evolving considerably due to often conflicting modern legislative trends (emphasis on consumer protection, emphasis on data processing transparency, support of client mobility in the banking sector, support of innovative financial services, sharing of data for crime prevention incl. terrorism, money laundering and tax evasion). The goal of this thesis is to present banking secrecy in a complex manner including the categories and the respective individual concrete piercings within the context of data processing legislation, including laying out interpretation problems from practice and proposing concrete solutions. Further, the thesis, where suitable, the thesis also includes proposals de lege ferenda. The thesis begins with an introduction to the subject matter and is further divided into four chapters, which are followed by a conclusion that sums up the partial conclusions made...

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Community Psychology) Faculty of Arts University of Zululand, 2010. / The lives of individuals in all societies are a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to the other. Among the Vhavenda, there are fine distinctions among age or occupational groups and progression from one group to the next is accompanied by special rituals enveloped in ceremonies which involve actions that are clearly regulated and guarded so that the entire society suffer no discomfort or injury. The research explores and describes the lived experiences of Vha-Venda initiated women in the rural areas of Mashau, Mashawana and Shayandima village in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The perception that transition practices, otherwise known as initiation rituals or rites of passage, are only practiced in the ‘traditional’ societies because it is believed to be where the culture is embedded. This study draws on qualitative research principles based on the ethnographic approach. This research explores and describes the lived experiences of initiation of Venda women that is practiced and currently being implemented in the three villages that is, Mashau, Mashawana and Shayandima village in Limpopo Province, South Africa. As a result, this study is informed by the qualitative data gathered during the initial stages of the research with the assistance of research guides. The core material in this study emerges from in depth, semi-structured interviews conducted during individual interviews and focus group interviews with fifteen initiated women and two research guides between the age of thirty and sixty. The research guides, with special knowledge of the culture assisted the researcher on the process and activities of the initiation and also informed the researcher about the venues where certain rituals take place and also assisted in translation of certain phrases for clarification. In compliance with research ethics, the identities of the respondents remain confidential through the use of pseudonyms. The research concludes that the lived experiences of women initiation are private and one is strictly prohibited to talk about them, especially with uninitiated women. The aim is to portray the traditional social and cultural ritual proposed to be learnt and preserved. In this study, the researcher’s findings are that: Conformity, compliance and obedience with the initiation rituals can save a person from embarrassment in Limpopo Province where initiation is practiced. Participants reported that women are silenced and forbidden to talk about initiation outside ‘dombani’ with the uninitiated women. They reported that the initiation ritual is secret and thus a taboo to talk about it. Initiates are prohibited to disclose what happens during the initiation process. In contrast, uninitiated women viewed the ritual as barbaric and promiscuous. The initiated indicated that they were forced to attend because of fear of rejection, discrimination and isolation by the community. Other participants agreed to have attended for the sake of acceptance, though they believed to have gained knowledge about understanding womanhood. Most of the women mentioned that although it was some years that they had attended the initiation school, they still carried the burden of anger, shame, humiliation, frustration, low-self esteem, sense of helplessness and lack confidence and still find it hard to share their experiences or talk about them. The researcher concurs with the participants and Stayt (1968) that initiated women are denied freedom of expression. It is sticky prohibited to talk or share the initiation experiences with the non- initiated let alone discuss it outside dombani. Thereby, the aim, and its concomitant 4 objectives, have been thoroughly explored and achieved.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also known as drones. Recently, UAVs have attracted the next generation researchers due to their flexible, dynamic, and cost-effective deployment, etc. Moreover, the UAVs have a wide range of application domains, such as rescue operation in the remote area, military surveillance, emergency application, etc. Given the UAVs are appropriately deployed, the UAVs provide continuous and reliable connectivity, on-demand, and cost-effective features to the desired destination in the wireless communication system. Thus, the UAVs can be a great choice to deploy as a mobile relay in co-existence with the base stations (BSs) on the ground to serve the 5G wireless users. In this thesis, the UAV-assisted mobile relay (UAV-MR) in the next generation wireless networks has been studied, which also considers the UAV-MR physical layer security. The proposed system also considers one ground user, one BS on the ground, and active presence of multiple eavesdroppers, situated nearby the ground user. The locations of these nodes (i.e., the ground user, the BS, and the eavesdroppers) are considered fixed on the ground. Moreover, the locations of the eavesdroppers are not precisely known to the UAV-MR. Thus, this thesis aims to maximize the achievable secrecy rate, while the BS sends the secure information to the ground user via the UAV-MR. However, the UAV-MR has some challenges to deploy in wireless networks, such as 3D deployment, robust resource allocation, secure UAV-MR to ground communication, the channel modeling, the UAV-MR flight duration, and the UAV-MR robust trajectory design, etc. Thus, this project investigates the UAV-MR assisted wireless networks, which addresses those technical challenges to guarantee efficient UAV-MR communication. Moreover, the mathematical frameworks are formulated to support the proposed model. An efficient algorithm is proposed to maximize the UAV-MR achievable secrecy rate. Finally, the simulation results show the improved performance for the UAV-MR assisted next-generation networks.

In writing this autoethnography, I invite you to enter into my world. It is not a world that is easy, or altogether happy. In the end, though, it is a story of survival and of perseverance. Trauma touches almost every person in some way. War, sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse, death, and difficult life events color how we make sense of the world. Trauma may happen in one blinding moment or slowly eat away at us for years. Writing is often a way to cope with that trauma. This dissertation represents a small portion of my traumatic lived experiences that led me up to the doctoral process, and those that occurred in the ten years it took me to complete my dissertation. / Doctor of Philosophy / In writing this autoethnography, I invite you to enter into my world. It is not a world that is easy, or altogether happy. In the end, though, it is a story of survival and of perseverance. Trauma touches almost every person in some way. War, sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse, death, and difficult life events color how we make sense of the world. Trauma may happen in one blinding moment or slowly eat away at us for years. Writing is often a way to cope with that trauma. This dissertation represents a small portion of my traumatic lived experiences that led me up to the doctoral process, and those that occurred in the ten years it took me to complete my dissertation.