Steve Wright

Leeds Beckett University | LEEDS MET · School of Social Sciences

There was a time within even this author’s memory, when there was no cyberspace, no cybercrime of note, no viruses and no anti-virus software, no hacking and no hackers. Cyber-delinquency was unknown, criminals had to do their criminality in the physical world and academic research was done in libraries not ‘on-line’. The speed of banking in that f...

Twentieth Anniversary of the signing of the Landmine Treaty - Demining Work continues to save lives from explosive remnants of war such as anti-personnel landmines

This editorial for the Surveillance and Security Intelligence After Snowden issue provides a very brief history of National Security Agency whistleblowers and investigations before Edward Snowden, and sets the current wave of NSA whistleblowing in the context of a growing demand for openness, transparency and accountability opposing the renewed clo...

Edward Snowden is exemplary of this strange and contradictory age of surveillance and transparency: far from being a senior internal figure like Drake or Binney, an actual working spy like Madsen or Tice, or even a developer for a technology provider and contractor like Margaret Newsham or Klein, he was simply a systems administrator, one of many r...

Written in a unique format, Shades of Deviance is a turbo-driven guide to crime and deviance, offering 56 politically engaged, thought-provoking and accessibly written accounts of a wide range of socially and legally prohibited acts. This book will be essential reading for undergraduate students in the fields of criminology and sociology and those...

This chapter argues that the process of securitization is already underway because of well funded and well founded concerns about internal state security and international terrorism. Security responses to climate induced migration are unlikely to be legitimated as climate security measures. They may be rather found under arcane programmes and confe...

This collection deals with challenges and opportunities faced by Muslims and the wider society in Europe following the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the London Transport attacks of 2005. The contributors explore the challenges to the concept and practice of civility in public life within a European context, and demonstrate the contributions tha...

Reviews the book, Who benefits from global violence and war: Uncovering a destructive system by Marc Pilisuk (see record 2008-00943-000). The author has written an extremely timely resource book. The author tears away the mask of the corporate global protection rackets, which necessitate the symptomatic patterns of high-tech killing and intimidatio...

The definitive history and analysis of ‘non-lethal’ weapons

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

New technologies under development, capable of inflicting pain on masses of people, could be used for border control against asylum seekers. Implementation might be rationalized by the threat of mass migration due to climate change, nuclear disaster or exaggerated fears of refugees created by governments. We focus on taser anti-personnel mines, sug...

The end of the Cold War ushered in a new phase of global security in which new threats and challenges emanate from non-conventional sources, and in which the weapons and means to prosecute war harness new technology. By the mid-1990's terms such as cyberwar and netwar were being used to explain a new way of thinking about war. The intervening years...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a more holistic approach to analysing the impact of all the behaviour of a conflict's participants its overall dynamics, using the example of the Northern Irish troubles. Design/methodology/approach – A novel multivariate time series approach developed by Professor Paul Smoker is presented which can...

Violent 'peace keeping' is a contradiction in terms but not if we analyse the provision of coercive law enforcement as just another organising process in state bureaucracies. This paper argues that events surrounding 9/11 merely accelerated processes of coercive peace keeping, which were already re-orientating following the end of the Cold-war. Pea...

Electroshock, stun and restraint technologies are often used for torture and as tools of repression. There is much information available exposing the problems with such technologies, but little about how to be effective in challenging their use. The concept of political ju-jitsu--the process by which an attack on a non-violent resister can backfire...

EC Efforts to restrict exports of torture and execution equipment from member states

This article tells the story behind the uncovering of the US operated global telecommunications interceptions system now known as ECHELON. It begins with the use of fieldwork techniques in the early 1970's exploring the configuration of Britain's Post Office Towers – these were ostensibly the microwave links through which Britain's long distance te...

As the number of countries joing the ban on anti‐personnel mines slowly rises, Landmine Action hasbeen investigating the weapons being stockpiled and invented to replace those banned. It seems that Governments, the military and manufacturers have not learned from the problems with landmines. They are stockpiling and quietly developing alternative m...

This article is based on two recent reports contracted by the European Parliament (EP), which assessed sub-lethal weapons as flexible tools of political control. It analyses the role and function of existing weapons systems in human rights abuses using examples from Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Northern Ireland and Turkey. These weapons are designed t...

Recently, much promise has been attached to non-lethal weapons as tools for managing contemporary security demands. The utility of this class of technology derives from the flexibility it supposedly offers in the use of force. Despite the growing literature on non-lethal weapons, few commentators have scrutinized them in a systematic fashion. Drawi...

Daily we provide new information about ourselves, when shopping, travelling, communicating on the Internet or telephone, or even when we are simply eating out at a local restaurant. The collection of information is a constant in our lives, with the commercial sector profiling every aspect of our behaviour, from the insurance policies we purchase to...

This chapter explores some key issues surrounding efforts by both state agencies and private companies to use the Internet as an intelligence gathering mechanism for political and commercial gain. Changes in global information harvesting technologies and techniques provide a means both to covertly gather economic information on commercial competito...

Dum Dum Bullets are outlawed but only in war - Police and counter terror units have increasingly adopted them for use on the homefront

Co-Author Draft report by Omega Foundation

Front Page launch article of Guardian's New feature Series on Science & Technology

Whilst developments in military hardware receive critical attention almost as a matter of course, innovations in police technology are only rarely focused upon. In this article an attempt is made to rectify this anomaly by providing a detailed survey of some recent devel opments in police technologies, as well as directing concern towards the unant...

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

upheaval. Meanwhile, military think-tanks, especially in the United States, are planning sophisticated new area and perimeter denial technologies and deployment rationales and strategies under the catch-all diktat of preparing for the asymmetrical 'war against terror'. These developments have come about because of a coalition of co- incidences rath...

This paper is essentially an introduction to the use of multivariate time series analyses of the Northern Irish conflict from 1969-1981.It draws on the conceptual work of Paul Smoker to describe systemic conflict relationships between all the parties to this conflict. Using some of the most comprehensive statistical documentation ever compiled on a...