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When Edward Snowden hit the send button on a laptop in Hong Kong in June 2013, just shy of his 30th birthday, he became the poster boy for an acutely American conundrum: the tension between the government's constitutional commitment to the privacy of individuals and its responsibility for the safety of the nation. Stuart Taylor, Jr. reviews 200 years of surveillance in the U.S., the leading actors in the NSA debate since Snowden's leaks, and the challenges that lie ahead-namely, finding the right balance between national security and individual privacy. Taylor also enlists four experts represe

This article is intended to highlight some key themes within the news media's reporting of drugs, drug users and drug-related crime.1 Its aim is to focus on how the news media represent illegal drugs and drug users and their causal links with further criminal behaviour. The article proposes that news media and governmental beliefs mirror each other and have both adopted a stance that serious or `problematic' drug use is dangerous and causes further criminality. It also asserts that both media coverage and policy direction are disproportionately aimed at specific stereotypes of drug users and drug-using offenders, to the point whereby simplistic notions have developed at the expense of a much wider and more complex discussion to the detriment of a holistic drugs discourse. The ramifications of such representations are that users of heroin and crack cocaine are thought of as risk-bearing `outsiders' and are actively excluded from society. The article will draw on a plethora of studies from across the globe through the belief that even in an era of media diversity and culturally diverse drug use, there are common globally identifiable themes within the news media's reporting of drugs and crime.

Primary prevention interventions, often in the form of media campaigns, are frequently utilized in order to tackle sexual violence. However, many in the United Kingdom have been criticized for perpetuating victim-blaming, due to their focus on the behaviour of women. One notable exception is a Liverpool City Council Campaign, which targeted young men (aged 18–24) in a bid to reduce rates of alcohol-related rape. Drawing upon an assessment involving 41 male university students, this article generates original insights into the development and utilization of male-focused rape prevention interventions. As this analysis shows, the young men's responses to the campaign involved negotiating discourses of sex, consent, rape, sexuality and gender – especially masculinity. While participants frequently drew upon stereotypes and misconceptions, moments of contestation and disruption emerged. We argue that interventions should concentrate upon masculinity and moments of disruption and contestation (possibly through the use of peer group discussions), in order to encourage critical reflections on gender and sexual violence and to potentially engender more ethical practices.

Classification with regard to their risk/needs has become an increasingly significant aspect of work with offenders generally. In England and Wales, the Offender Assessment System (OASys) used by the National Probation Service has a key role to play in effective practice. OASys is the latest in a series of such assessment tools, but despite considerable care taken over its development, users' views about its efficacy have not been explored. This article reports the results of the first national survey of Probation Officers' views about OASys. While a variety of concerns are noted - especially the time-consuming nature of completing an OASys assessment - and such concerns need to be addressed, on the whole, users are not opposed to OASys.

Central government contributes around one-half of the cost incurred by local authorities in financing and managing state schools in England. The Block Grant system, dating from the 1980 Rate Support Grant settlement, introduced the concept of the payment of grant in relation to the number of clients rather than, as previously, actual expenditures. Within that framework, adjustments are made to compensate for certain unavoidable, non-discretionary factors which serve to increase unit costs in particular authorities. This paper is concerned with the problems caused by 'sparsity', a term used to refer to the sparse nature of population distribution. Several pieces of research have identified sparsity as a cause of increased unit costs of provision: by necessitating schools of smaller size (in which overhead costs cause diseconomies) and/or higher costs for the transportation of pupils. The way in which these factors operate was found to differ between the primary and secondary sectors. A method was devised which sought to evaluate the additional costs attributable to sparsity, independently of local authority policy preferences and the other factors affecting variation in unit costs. A 'standardised unit cost' was derived which related costs to the 'norm' of the average national unit cost. The cost measure was then regressed against a measure of the incidence of sparsity to derive a 'fitted' unit cost, such that compensation would only be paid where actual sparsity was observed. The resulting Grants Related Expenditure Assessment (GREA) has been subjected to continuing refinement and adjustment via a process of negotiation with the local authority associations; the paper describes some of the resulting changes.