Lexis Nexis Hunt 2008—The Laws Of The Law

I have posted some discussions on some of the questions from the Lexis Nexis Hunt. Although I have been critical on those questions, don't think that my team failed to solve them! On the contrary, we managed to solve them all!

So where did we go wrong? Well, in spite of all those extensive analysis (yes, I analyse deeply during the hunt too), we failed to answer 2 questions. The following is one of them:

Q27) AKDN laws perhaps are their expertise too.

Not a very difficult question, provided that you know what's AKDN. But unfortunately, none of us knew the meaning of the abbreviation AKDN. If Tun Dr Mahathir and Pak Lah were hunting together with us that day, I'm sure they could've been a very big help; that is if they can refrain from getting at each other's throats in the car, of course. The AKDN is a very useful and convenient weapon of those holding high office in the Malaysian Government.

Although we did not know what's AKDN, perhaps there's still hope to guess the answer based on the rest of the words in the clue. For example, we have the word "laws" followed by "perhaps". There're 2 ways to look at it.

Firstly, it's possible that the word "perhaps" is an anagram indicator. That would mean the solver needs to anagram that word "laws" or even both "AKDN laws" to form a new word (s). But after a brief consideration, I abandoned that idea. The presence of 2 "A"s in AKDN+laws did not seem very promising to produce any meaningful word (s). Of course I have also considered the possibility of a Malay word.

Secondly, it's possible that the word "perhaps" is to be taken literally—as a suggestive word. If that's the intention of the setter, then we have no choice but to know AKDN. Then again, even if we don't know AKDN, we can at least guess its meaning. Looking at "AKDN laws" from a general point of view, it seems that AKDN is referring to the name of an establishment, say a state or country. For example, we would say "Malaysian laws".

Now an important consideration is whether it's possible that AKDN is referring to a statute; say an enactment or some legal code? This possibility did not appear to be promising to me during the hunt, because it is not natural to construct an English sentence with the name of a statute followed by the word "law". It is more natural to use the words "sections" and "provisions" to refer to the contents of a statute. The use of the word "laws" in this context is at least abnormal, if not totally wrong.

It was revealed during the answer presentation that AKDN means Akta Keselamatan Dalam Negeri, a favourite statute of the ruling Goverment. I think it is more accurate to say the "provisions of AKDN" and not "laws of AKDN", because AKDN is itself a law.

Anyway, the English version of the statute is Internal Security Act, or ISA in short. The required answer, for obvious reason:

A27) ISA Technologies