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Michiko Kakutani reviewed O'Harrow's No Place To Hide in today's New York Times.
This surveillance state is not a futuristic place conjured in a Philip K. Dick novel or "Matrix"-esque sci-fi thriller. It is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, "No Place to Hide" - an America where citizens' "right to be let alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court once put it, is increasingly imperiled, where more and more components of our daily lives are routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed.These concerns, of course, are hardly new. Way back in 1964, in "The Naked Society," Vance Packard warned about encroachments on civil liberties and the growing threat to privacy posed by new electronic devices, and in 1971, in "The Assault on Privacy," Arthur R. Miller warned that advances in information technologies had given birth to "a new social virus - 'data-mania.' " The digital revolution of the 1990's, however, exponentially amplified these trends by enabling retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and store vast amounts of information about current and potential customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people."
My review of the book for the January 5 edition of Wired News is here.
Update: I changed the Kakutani link to what should be a permanent link using Aaron Swartz's link generator, since the original link will soon disappear into the black hole of the paper's archive, only retrievable by those with LexisNexis accounts or enough desperation to pay $4.95 for old news .
Of course, Swartz's tool has other uses, especially for those frustrated by searching on the NYTimes's website for older articles. But perhaps someday soon, the Times will realize their strategy to make a buck or two from the desperate or stupid (maybe high schoolers writing research papers?) means it is no longer the newspaper of record, at least in the online world.
Posted by Ryan Singel at January 25, 2005 10:29 AM
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» Openness vs Privacy on C-SPAN Book TV This Sunday from The Open Society Paradox
For those of you interested in watching Robert O'Harrow speak about his vision of Big Brother described in his book No Place to Hide, he will be on C-SPAN Book TV this Sunday at 11:00. To make things interesting, they... [Read More]
Tracked on January 26, 2005 07:59 PM
Post a commentRegarding the NYTimes, you should also note that if you subscribe to their RSS feeds, the links in those feeds never expire.
Posted by: Mithras at January 25, 2005 10:19 PM
For those of you interested in watching Robert O'Harrow speak about his vision of Big Brother described in his book No Place to Hide, he will be on C-SPAN Book TV this Sunday at 11:00. To make things interesting, they have my presentation of The Open Society Paradox: Why the Twenty First Century Calls for More Openness Not Less scheduled one hour before O'Harrow at 10:00 am. Two diametrically opposed viewpoints, back to back on C-SPAN. Sorry Fox but that's a better idea of fair and balanced.
Posted by: Dennis Bailey at January 26, 2005 07:58 PM