International Edition Volume 9 (2019)


Passenger Name Records Data in the Fight Against Serious Crime. The path from the Passenger Name Records Directive to national law

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Viola Kainz, Marina Prunner

In a modern, highly interconnected world, the activities of organised or terrorist crime do not stop at national borders. In response to the lifting of internal border controls by the Schengen Agreement and fuelled by recent terrorist attacks in Europe, the European Union has established rules for the international exchange of personal Passenger Name Records (PNR) data between law enforcement agencies. The PNR Directive will complement existing tools to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute terrorist offences and serious crime through the use of PNR data. The processing of PNR data and related specific data analysis has created the ability to not only identify people already in the crosshairs of the law enforcement agencies, but also to find new investigative approaches to identify those individuals who were previously unknown to law enforcement agencies, but could be linked to a terrorist offence or an offence of similar gravity. The PNR Directive was implemented throughout Austria by the Federal Law on the Processing of Passenger Name Records for the Prevention, Hindrance and Resolution of Terrorist and Certain Other Offences (PNR Law). This article aims to give the reader an insight into the background of the processing of PNR data (1) and the European PNR system (2) as well as a comprehensive overview of the essential content of the new PNR Law (3).

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Security-Related Issues in EU-SILC Surveys. Descriptive analysis of data from the 2007-2016 period.

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Hanns Matiasek

SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) is an annual statutory survey on income and living conditions in all Member States of the European Union. In Austria, around 6,000 households comprising about 11,000 people are surveyed by Statistics Austria every year. The survey also contains a number of questions relevant to security and questions which should be assigned to the topic of security and society. This includes, for example, the issue of crime in the living environment, the sense of security and the accessibility of a police station. The evaluation results of the 2007-2016 surveys will be presented in this paper, focusing on the descriptive evaluation.

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Dating of Fingermarks: Fiction or Reality?

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Aline Girod-Frais

"When was this fingermark left? Is it fresh?" These questions are frequently asked at the crime scene, during the investigation and also in the courtroom. They are particularly relevant if the suspect admits having left his or her fingermark at the crime scene, yet claims that this did not happen during the crime, rather before – or after – the criminal activity. In other words, the dating of a fingermark can represent an important part of the investigation if the suspect does not question the identification of his or her fingermark, but rather the time at which it was left. An international case study has found that fingermark experts sometimes give fairly accurate answers when asked about the age of a fingermark. However, are such statements permissible? Can the age of a fingermark really be determined? The aim of this article is to answer this question through a practiceoriented discussion of current research results. Therefore, the issue of the temporal dimension in forensic science is addressed first. Then, cases in which the age of fingermarks found at crime scene played an important role are discussed. Subsequently, the key international research results on fingermark dating will be presented, with particular focus on studies that examine the aging of specific, intrinsic, physical characteristics and chemical components over time using optical and analytical methods. Towards the end of the article, the extent to which these research results can be used in practice is finally discussed and an outlook on the future of fingermark dating is presented.

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Pocket Spies. Advanced Persistent Espionage Campaigns Go Mobile

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Maschenka Braganca

Mobile advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns are simply the natural evolution of an attack type. It was just a matter of time before attackers would focus on exploiting a device that is so critical to our digital life. Threat actors always try to be ahead of the game, and advancements in tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used shouldn't come as a surprise. While we notice massive changes in the way malware is written, developed and new techniques pioneered that help leave infiltration unnoticed (hardware embedded malware or fileless malware, etc.), little attention has been paid to the mobile front, although it certainly is the one electronic device no one can function without. Over the past year, we have been observing how attackers use a device that is so ubiquitous in everyone’s daily life, together with the sophistication of serious malware authors that aren’t just trying to siphon off a few bucks. This has given rise to what some security research classify as a new category of advanced attacks that some even call "Mobile APTs" with a clear nation-state component. APT actors have traditionally operated on PC platforms, but are now rediscovering the mobile segment through evolving tactics. This article will explore these "mobile APTs" and place them in the context of recent changes in the general threat landscape.

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SI-ALT. Police and age: Fostering the subjective sense of security of older and very old men and women in public spaces

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Stefan Hopf, Tanja Obex, Rebekka Rohner

SI-ALT deals with the challenges which police officers will face in the coming decades due to demographic change and an ageing society. They are increasingly being assigned tasks which they, as contact persons in public spaces, have to manage using strong communication skills. One group which should be given special attention to facilitate its participation in public life is that of the older and very old adults. A possible explanation for the withdrawal of older adults is a lack of a subjective sense of security. Although there are national and international surveys on the population's subjective sense of security, little is known about how the subjective sense of security of older adults presents itself at a detailed level and how this population group can be taken into account in police work. This gap in research is closed by SI-ALT. In the framework of this project quantitative and qualitative surveys were conducted in three pilot regions agreed upon with the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) on the perspectives of older and very old adults as well as police officers regarding security in public spaces. The aim of the project was to develop products based on these surveys that make a valuable contribution to prevention and communication efforts and to the way in which police officers deal with older and very old people. This article outlines the project’s procedure, gives an overview of the data collection methods and presents the products developed. The project, funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) within the framework of the security research funding programme KIRAS, was carried out by the Security Research Network (the queraum. cultural and social research and the Competence Centre for Empirical Research Methods of the Vienna University of Economics and Business) in cooperation with the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna (with an emphasis on social gerontology) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior.

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Compliance With the Law and Cooperation Through Police Legitimacy. An empirical study of the procedural justice model of police legitimacy in Austria

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Silvia Antensteiner

The question of whether a strict sanctions policy can actually reduce the crime rate of a country comes up time and again in the current discussion about criminal policy. One model, originally from the United States, suggests that crime can be prevented if people are subjected to social control through attachment and normative identification with the police as state authority: the procedural justice model of police legitimacy. The assumptions of the model were examined in the article presented here using empirical data from Austria. The findings show that the legal behaviour of citizens depends substantially on the procedural justice practiced by the police.

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From Tribes to States. Evolutionary aspects of complex societies

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Alexander Schahbasi, Martin Fieder

Social complexity has increased substantially as humans evolved from foraging huntergatherers to living in nation states. Tracking this ascent of complexity, biological anthropology can shed light on some of the underlying forces driving human behavior. Considering the contemporary leap in in complexity due to the digital revolution, an understanding of historical trends and the evolutionary mechanisms of human cooperation, violence and mating allows a profound assessment of current developments.

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Migration and History. The way to a transnational culture of remembrance

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Linda Lilith Jakubowicz

The issue of migration is more relevant than ever. The variants of legal immigration to Austria are also increasingly being considered and discussed in the wake of the developments of the last few years – especially the experiences of the socalled "refugee crisis" of 2015. On the whole, this is happening ahead of widereaching efforts to gauge the issue of migration in its entirety and complexity more deeply than ever before, to develop state regulations and to arrive at a national migration strategy, which also takes global implications into consideration. Against this background, the 2015 establishment of the Migration Council under the direction of Paul Lendvai is to be judged as the continuation of its work in the Migration Commission as a consultative body of the competent departments in the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior and – with the establishment of Department III/13 (National, European and International Migration Strategies) – the creation of the corresponding administrative structures in the same.

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