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The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the legal environment influences a user’s choice to employ privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Drawing upon existing theoretical frames specific to arbitrariness and uncertainty, this research examines whether interest in PETs is influenced by the legal environment of a country.

Using data from Google Trends, the International Property Rights Index, Freedom House and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research analyzes interest in Tor, VPN technology and pretty good privacy (PGP) in 153 countries between 2012 and 2016.

Findings suggest both countries with both higher and lower arbitrariness and uncertainty of law are associated with an increased interest in Tor and PGP. However, interest in VPN technology does not appear influenced by the legal environment and, instead, is influenced by freedom within the press.

The dual use nature of Tor and PGP is influenced by law enforcement and judiciary effectiveness and transparency and arbitrariness contributing to the public’s interest in decentralized technological protections.

Law enforcement should continue to police via the technologies rather than shutting them down to protect the identities of those needing to use these technologies for legitimate purposes. Only by embracing the technologies, as opposed to seeing them as hurdles to be banned, may law enforcement agencies remain vigilant to the threats posted by nefarious actors.

In this study, the authors introduce a more robust measure of interest in PETs, and do so with a larger, more substantive sample. By situating this interest within the context of policing, the authors can document the dual use nature of the technology, which can be useful in guiding future research, specifically in the area of policy development and officer training.

The participation of women in contemporary non-state armed groups is an undeniable fact. In recent years, research in international politics has provided a more complex view of both the scale and nature of their contributions, as well as why women choose to engage in political violence – when they do indeed choose to do so. This chapter offers an overview of the literature in this area, while expanding the discussion towards new and emerging questions. In particular, the chapter seeks to engage a growing literature on the legal and social aspects of women's involvement in armed conflict. Discussing women's roles as perpetrators of atrocity and war crimes – including as agents of torture, sexual violence and genocide – it addresses concerns about the meaningful integration of gender into post-conflict and transitional justice processes. This includes discussions about agency and the problematic entanglement of victim/perpetrator narratives in the cases of female ex-combatants.

We've been living in a homogenous world, you know a world centered on and seen through the language perceptions of men. The consequences of this for everything that we take for granted, for all our assumptions are very deep. Feminism, in the sense I use it, is a radical complexity thought in the process of transforming itself. It is a kind of breaking open of not only the oversimplification but of the lies and the silence in which so much of human experience has been cloaked. Too much has been left out, too much has been unmentioned, too much has been made taboo. Too many connections have been disguised or denied. (Interview with Adrienne Rich, Christopher Street, Jan. 1977, pp. 9–16.)