other writings

This page deals with other books about privacy in the online environment. 

     policy development

The Electronic Privacy Papers edited by Bruce Schneier & David Banisar (San Francisco: Wiley 97) is a unique compilation of key US government and private sector documents about encryption, privacy policy, law enforcement and other matters. Schneier's Secrets & Lies: Digital Security In A Networked World (New York: Wiley 00) is strongly recommended.

For a personal perspective on how US cyber policy is developed (often on the hop, at great expense, with much noise from the media) you could do worse than turn to Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York: Times 1998), a memoir by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Mike Godwin.

Whitfield Diffie & Susan Landau offer a more analytical study in the excellent Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping & Encryption (Cambridge: MIT Press 99). Diffie is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography.  

     practice

Regrettably, much of the writing about privacy in newspapers and magazines is anecdotal.  H Jeff Smith's Managing Privacy: Information Technology & Corporate America (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 95) largely predates the Web but is of value for its detailed exploration of how many US businesses develop privacy policies and - more importantly - the extent to which those policies are implemented. 

Databanks in a Free Society: Computers, Record-keeping & Privacy. (New York: Quadrangle 72) by  Alan Westin & Michael Baker) is of similar value in understanding current US privacy debates. Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television, and Social Control (Aldershot: Ashgate 98) edited by Clive Norris, Jade Moran & Gary Armstrong is essential reading for those interested in facecams and biometrics.

Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access by Anne Wells Branscomb (New York: Basic Books 94) is an overview of the interrelationship between privacy, as viewed in the US, and intellectual property - touching on electronic mail, medical records, government data, credit records and other information. Raymond Wacks' drier Personal Information: Privacy & the Law (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 89) and Privacy & Loyalty (Oxford: Clarendon 98) edited by Peter Birks offer a UK perspective.

There's a more detailed exploration of particular issues in David Brin's thoughtful The Transparent Society (Reading: Perseus Books 98), which highlights the notion of reciprocal transparency, ie government and business sharing with citizens the information collected about them.  

Who Knows? Safeguarding Your Privacy In A Networked World by Ann Cavoukian & Don Tapscott (New York: McGraw-Hill 97) is one of Tapscott's better books, embracing principles and legislation, workplace and medical privacy, the technologies of surveillance and a call to action.  

Gavin Skok provides a useful introduction to questions about 'clickstreams' (ie tracking how you've surfed the Web) in his Establishing A Legitimate Expectation of Privacy In Clickstream Data article for the May 00 issue of the Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review.

Laura Gurak's Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 97) is an account, albeit marred by deconstructivist jargon, of citizen campaigns against Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip, two US proposals with serious privacy implications.  

A perspective on the latter proposal is provided by Dorothy Denning's excellent Information Warfare & Security (Reading: Addison-Wesley 99), along with papers at her site.

    communitarianism

Amitai Etzioni offers fashionable but generally unconvincing communitarian arguments in The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books 99), summarized in his 1999 article Less Privacy Is Good For Us (and You).  

There's a more thoughtful treatment of philosophies and legal developments in Judith Decew's In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics & the Rise of Technology (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 97).

David Lyon's The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society (Minneapolis, Uni of Minnesota Press 94) is a useful introduction to the US literature on pervasive surveillance and fears about systems such as Carnivore and Echelon. It is more insightful than Michel Foucault's The Eye of Power - in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon 80) - and other mannerist tracts.

John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 00) and Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 01) - co-edited with Jane Caplan - are useful introductions to both the bits of paper and broader questions of 'identity' in modern societies. This site features a supplementary profile that highlights writing about the 'surveillance state' (whether involving government agencies or the media) and identity schemes such as passports and national identification cards.

    government

 The File: A Personal History (London: HarperCollins 97) is Timothy Garton Ash's memoir of living in the East German surveillance state.

Among the wide range of literature on government secrecy and what used to be called 'national information policy' we've singled out the short essays in A Culture of Secrecy: The Government versus the People's Right To Know (Lawrence: Uni Press of Kansas 98) and Greg Terrill's recent Secrecy & Openness: The Federal Government From Menzies to Whitlam and Beyond (Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press 00), embracing archives and freedom of information law and policy.  

We've explored information policy and government privacy/secrecy in the final part of our censorship guide. 

In the European Union the European Commission's Data Directive was the subject of None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce & the European Privacy Directive (Washington: Brookings 98) by Peter Swire & Robert Litan.

Susan Gindin's 1998 San Diego Law Review paper Lost & Found in Cyberspace: Informational Privacy in the Age of the Internet surveyed privacy-invasive technologies and legal remedies.



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