What would make women feel safer? For perpetrators of sexual assaults and abuse to getmore than a 15-month sentence after they assault 13 women and girls? A culture where thevictims of sexual crime are not blamedwhen they are attacked? Or would having hairy legs do it?

In the battle againstrape culturesome innovators seem to think that old-fashioned notions of strong legislation need a few more, bells, whistles and technological wizardry. Here are some recent ideas from around the world.

Anti-pervert stockings

Fact: women with hairy legs are never sexually harassed or assaulted. At least that seems to be the thinking behind these fetchinghairy leggings, which have become a viral sensation in China. Posted on the microblogging siteWeibo, they are described as "full-leg-of-hair stockings, essential for all young girls going out". Sadly, once posted in the UK, commentators were quick to point out the flaws of the inventor's cunning plan. "This is exactly the sort of thing that drives us perverts wild," wrote one.

Banning lingerie mannequins

If a fatal and exceptionallyviolent gang rapehad left your country reeling, with protesters pouring out on to the streets to complain about a culture of impunity for rapists, who would you blame? One municipal council in India knew: shop mannequins wearing lingerie. According to aMumbai municipal council resolutionthey "promote rapes", and were ordered to be removed as a matter of public safety. "After all," said city councillor Ritu Tawde, "a mannequin is a replica of a woman's body." There is no news yet as to whether the council thinks scantily-clad women should also be banned.

The screaming alarm

If you think standard personal alarms are easy to ignore, theila Duskhas a more tech-savvy approach. When you pull the chain of the device it emits "an ear-piercing 130-decibel female scream that research has shown others are more likely to respond to than a traditional alarm", according to the packaging. But when theGuardian asked the personal safety campaign group Suzy Lamplugh Trustfor their thoughts on the device, they pointed out that screams just confused bystanders and that shouting instructions such as "Call the police" would work better.

The actions of the US government in spying on its and other countries' citizens have been sharply criticised byNoam Chomsky, the prominent political thinker, as attacks on democracy and the people.

"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy which is their own population," he told the Guardian.

In his first public comment on the scandal that has enveloped the US, UK and other governments, as well as internet companies such as Google andMicrosoft, Chomsky said he was not overly surprised technology and corporations were being used in this way.

"This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it," he said. "They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich."

Chomsky, who has strongly supported the Occupy movement and spoken out against theObama administration's use of drones, warned that young people were much less shocked at being spied on and did not view it as such a problem.

"Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation. It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the internet culture, with Facebook and so on," he said. "On the internet, you think everything is going to be public."

Other technologies could also come to be used to spy more effectively on people, he added. "They don't want people to know what they're doing. They want to be able to use [new technology] against their own people.

"Take a look at drones, and what is developing. You will find new drone technology being used in 10 or 12 years from now. They are looking at [trying to make] tiny drones that can go in your living room, like a fly on the wall."

He praised the Guardian's revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency, and thewhistleblower Ed Snowden, who has been taking refuge in Hong Kong. "We need this kind [of journalism]," he said. "We ought to know about it."

Chomsky, a much-lauded academic and professor of linguistics, gained renown as a political critic when he vocally opposed the Vietnam war. Since then, he has written dozens of books on political power, capitalism and democracy and espoused a variety of activist campaigns, most recently the Occupy movement.

For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyber warfare.

Thats the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allens enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firms profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.

Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

But just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.

Just ask New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller. Rising to the defense of NSA snooping on a scale never before imagined in human history, they warn us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off.

I believe that if there is one more 9/11or worse, an attack involving nuclear materialit could lead to the end of the open s...

If ever you accused Barack Obama of fearing to offend or suffering from lack of spine, you have to hand it to him now: President Obama is acting more and more like a leader every day, one specific leader in fact: George W. Bush.

Take the recent disclosures about the National Security Agency's massive spying on the world. The data dragnet mimics the worst of the Bush administration.

It's hypocritical in the extreme to gather data in the name of preventing terrorism while the administration's own policies are creating terrorism around the world, says MIT professor emeritus, Noam Chomsky in thisGRITtv exclusive interview.

Lynne Stewart, the fearless defense attorney with a taste for representing controversial clients, is serving a ten-year prison sentence as her lung cancer spreads. Sixty pounds slimmer and losing time, Stewart was granted compasssionate release six weeks ago, but is still not free.

Stewart was convicted of on conspiracy charges for providing material support to terrorists in 2005, but she and her supporters stress that she was simply delivering a press release to a Reuters journalist, honoring her client's1st Amendment rights. In 2010, charges of perjury led her to be re-sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Read more on her website.

Right-wing opponents of immigration reform expected to get a potent weapon when they requested that the Congressional Budget Office score the reforms offered by the Senate Gang of Eight. But it turned out to be one of those 'be careful of what you wish for' moments, when CBO projected that the Senate bill would cut the dreaded federal deficit by $197 billion over the next ten years, and $700 billion more in the decade after that.

Cheered on by the Heritage Foundation which has been squishy on immigration reform in the past and is now trying to shore up its creds with the Tea Party set Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, one of the staunchest opponents of immigration reform (who only incidentally happens to be a vile racist) requested that the CBO analyze the impacts of the law beyond its usual 10-year window.

So they did. In addition to the positive impact on the budget, CBO says 8 million unauthorized immigrants would likely come out of the shadows (after paying $1,000 fine and jumping through some other hoops). By 2023, CBO estimates a small hit of 0.1 percent to native-born workers' wages, but says the reforms would boost native wages by 0.5 percent in 2033.

Overall, as Ezra Klein puts it:

The bills overall effect on the overall economy is unambiguously positive: CBO expects real GDP to increase by 3.3 percent by 2023 and by 5.4 percent in 2033. The reasoning here is a bit more complex: Its not just that the bill would mean more workers, but that it would mean more productive workers. CBO says that the law would lead to slightly higher productivity of both labor and capital because the increase in immigration particularly of highly skilled immigrants would tend to generate additional technological advancements, such as new inventions and improvements in production processes.

Sessions was no doubt expecting a very different forecast, because it's a matter of faith in his circles that immigrants are the worst parasites among Romney's mythical 47 percent. This isn't the first time that belief has blown up in nativists' faces either. In the early 1990s, it was anti-immigrant hard-liners who pushed for the creation of the Jordan Commission to do a comprehensive study of immigration to the United States. And it, too, found that first and second-generation immigrants pay more in taxes than they take in services and have a net positive impact on native wages (the National Research Council study's book-length findings can be read online here).

Now comes the least surprising news you will ever hear: having requested an analysis which produced results they didn't like, the right is crying foul, and accusing the bipartisan Gang of Eight of cooking the books. Congress Is Trying to Fool You on Immigr...