I have always been suspicious of government and corporate power, but it was only when my officemate in graduate school started teaching me about digital technologies that I really focused on the power relations involved in institutionalized surveillance. Eventually, I discovered the cypherpunk movement, which opposes surveillance. I wanted to know what they knew, so I started to read everything I could about surveillance. I found that few journalists and almost no academics attended to the powerful message of the cypherpunks, so I decided that I would write the first academic book about the movement, hoping that I could do my part to raise awareness about this crucial issue.
I wrote...
Cypherpunk Ethics: Radical Ethics for the Digital Age
Westin’s book completely blew me away the first time I read it. I felt like I had discovered a long-lost time capsule containing everything I needed to know about the technological and social changes that created the foundations for surveillance in the United States today.
Since Edward Snowden, I tended to think about surveillance in terms of the internet and the National Security Agency. But Westin showed me that surveillance is much broader—socially and historically—than the NSA’s surveillance of the internet. Westin provided me with a template for analyzing surveillance.
Westin distinguishes physical surveillance from data surveillance, and he examines the difference between corporate and government surveillance. Most importantly, I found his recommendations for protecting privacy in the face of increased surveillance powers incredibly relevant even today.
"He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis."—Jeffrey Rosen
In defining privacy as “the claim of individuals…to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated,” Alan Westin’s 1967 classic Privacy and Freedom laid the philosophical groundwork for the current debates about technology and personal freedom, and is considered a foundational text in the field of privacy law.
By arguing that citizens retained control over how their personal data was used, Westin redefined privacy as an individual freedom, taking Justice Louis Brandeis’ 19th century definition of privacy as a legal right and…
I read Bamford’s work because I wanted to understand the history of the NSA, and I was not disappointed. I loved learning, in excruciating detail, about the surveillance techniques and programs of the NSA before the internet.
This book shattered my impression that the NSA was a responsible agency that turned “bad” during the War on Terror. Bamford showed me that modern-day NSA mass surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, actually represents the normal workings of the NSA rather than merely being an aberration. The most important lesson, though, was that the NSA has worked so hard to suppress the public use of encryption, the most important anti-surveillance technology we have.
In this remarkable tour de force of investigative reporting, James Bamford exposes the inner workings of America's largest, most secretive, and arguably most intrusive intelligence agency. The NSA has long eluded public scrutiny, but The Puzzle Palace penetrates its vast network of power and unmasks the people who control it, often with shocking disregard for the law. With detailed information on the NSA's secret role in the Korean Airlines disaster, Iran-Contra, the first Gulf War, and other major world events of the 80s and 90s, this is a brilliant account of the use and abuse of technological espionage.
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
I read this book because I studied the cypherpunks, and I found Burnham’s work cited in one of the cypherpunk’s essays. It was published in 1983, but I felt like it could have been published today. I was met with surprises on every page. I had to rethink the nature of surveillance itself.
Written in the wake of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s, Burnham taught me that the computerization of society—with its increasingly networked systems and exponentially growing databases—is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual rights.
Even everyday things we now take for granted, like direct deposit and paying with debit cards, feed the surveillance machine. When governments and corporations coordinate to watch us all, we cease to be free citizens and become more like consumers on probation.
The Rise of the Computer State is a comprehensive examination of the ways that computers and massive databases are enabling the nation’s corporations and law enforcement agencies to steadily erode our privacy and manipulate and control the American people. This book was written in 1983 as a warning. Today it is a history. Most of its grim scenarios are now part of everyday life. The remedy proposed here, greater public oversight of industry and government, has not occurred, but a better one has not yet been found. While many individuals have willingly surrendered much of their privacy and all of…
This may be the first book about surveillance that I ever read, and it left a lasting impression on me. I was shocked by the details in Greenwald’s analysis of the NSA documents provided to him by Edward Snowden. I was convinced that something had to be done about mass surveillance.
It was really the later chapters of the book that hooked me. I appreciated Greenwald’s description of the scale of NSA surveillance and the social harms that result from mass surveillance practices. I was also awakened to some of the problems in mainstream journalism when Greenwald recounted his experiences publishing on the Snowden documents. Though some journalists, like Bamford and Burnham, have been willing to challenge the government on surveillance, Greenwald taught me that such journalists are quite rare.
A groundbreaking look at the NSA surveillance scandal, from the reporter who broke the story, Glenn Greenwald, star of Citizenfour, the Academy Award-winning documentary on Edward Snowden
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency's widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
Before reading Zuboff, I tended to think of surveillance only in terms of government surveillance. Zuboff showed me how wrong that was. I learned that corporations conduct as much, if not more, surveillance than governments. What’s more, corporations also collaborate with governments, which expands the overall surveillance apparatus to frightening degrees.
Zuboff convincingly shows how seemingly unrelated phenomena came together to change capitalism. I learned that Google and Facebook created the framework for surveillance capitalism by combining behavioral psychology with data collection and advertising practices.
These tech giants are not interested in serving free citizens; they are interested in creating docile consumers. While Snowden first showed me the dangers of government surveillance, Zuboff showed me that corporate surveillance may be even more dangerous.
'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell…
My book explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age.
Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy: crypto anarchy and crypto justice. It examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. This book is relevant for anyone—scholars, activists, and citizens—who care about privacy in the digital age.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
