American Privacy

by Frederick S. Lane

A page-turning narrative of privacy and the evolution of communication, from broken sealing wax to high-tech wiretapping
 
Recent years have seen an explosion in communications technology, and the more advanced such technology grows, the more curtailed our privacy becomes. It has never been easier for corporations and governments to collect vast amounts of information about each and every American, writes Frederick S. Lane. In this deft and eye-opening history, he illustrates how we arrived at this breaking point.
 
Lane traces the origins of the right to privacy, from the Bill of Rights to the controversial 1960s Supreme Court cases that first formally recognized it, and lays bare the speed with which technological and social changes swamped all efforts to maintain that right. From the telegraph and postcard to e-mail and cell phones, from mainframe computers to radio-frequency ID chips, new technology has carried the promise of convenience and the danger of privacy invasion.
 
The economic, social, and political implications of this unregulated and unsupervised surveillance are profound, yet when it comes to protecting the right to privacy, Americans are often their own worst enemies. Legally, technologically, and historically grounded, American Privacy concludes with a call for Congress to recognize how innovation and infringement often go hand-in-hand, and a challenge to citizens to protect privacy before it is lost completely.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Frederick S. Lane is an author, attorney, expert witness, and lecturer who has appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. After graduating from Amherst College and Boston College Law School, Lane clerked for two years for the Honorable Frank H. Freedman, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. After practicing law for five years and writing his first book, Vermont Jury Instructions -- Civil and Criminal (with John Dinse and Ritchie Berger), Lane launched a computer consulting business that in time led to his current work as a computer forensics expert and author.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Categories: Privacy, Technology, History
Time Period: Colonial era-present
Major Influences: Brandeis and Warren, E.L. Godkin, Arthur L. Miller, Alan Westin

Argument Synopsis
Lane defines privacy as a function of an individual's ability to determine what information will be shared with others and under what circumstances it will be shared. He shows how Americans' ability to exercise this type of control has deteriorated throughout our country's history -- sometimes because of government or corporate overreach, but just as often because we decide to trade privacy for the convenience offered by new technologies (telegraph, postcards, photography, telephone, computing and databasing, Google). The Social Security Number (Treasury Decision 4704), in Lane's telling, emerges as the key to linking information about individuals together and, ultimately, enabling large-scale data mining by the government and corporations. The use of information for purposes other than originally intended dominates the recent history of privacy in America. Lane asserts that the Government needs to help protect citizens by educating them and regulating those who would encroach on privacy.


Key Points
- "Few aspects of personal privacy are more important than the confidentiality of one’s thoughts and communications." (1)
- "...the word “privacy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, nor in any of the seventeen amendments added to the Constitution since." (15)
-"More than anything else, Morse’s telegraph convincingly illustrated that the average person was willing to trade the widely assumed and legally guaranteed privacy of personal communication by mail for speed and convenience." (23)
-"The postcard phenomenon convincingly demonstrated that from the start, Americans were willing to give up a certain amount of privacy in exchange for the fun and convenience of using the cards." (31)
-"Unwittingly, Treasury Decision 4704 set in motion a long series of events that have radically reshaped personal privacy in America: for the first time, each person in the United States had a unique identification number." (109)

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frederick Lane's American Privacy is insightful, informative, and imminently readable. After a relatively brief introduction discussing some modern issues relating to privacy, Mr. Lane's book follows a primarily chronologically the development of the concept of personal privacy in America from the Colonial Era, through the American Revolution, the Industrial Age, the Civil War, the World Wars, the Cold War and the then-current War on Terror. Within this mostly chronological framework, the author as constructed thematically-linked chapters and sub-chapters that examine the issue of privacy in various contexts. Of particular interest for me was his discussion of the early development of the U.S. Postal Service and it's attendant privacy-related concerns, the examination of the census process throughout U.S. history as a microcosm of the governmental desire to accumulate data about citizens, and his discussion of the rise of consumer credit use that occasioned ever-greater intrusion by corporations into the personal lives of Americans. Despite Mr. Lane's tendency to attack with great vigor the Bush Administration's "attack" on personal privacy following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, overall the work avoids a sense of righteous anger and/or preaching so that the facts, as they were, may stand on their own and be judged by the reader according to his or her own beliefs regarding privacy. The last chapter of the book contains Mr. Lane's own personal prescription for the best ways to preserve privacy in the America in the 21st Century, including a call for the establishing of a governmental enforcement agency tasked with developing, proposing, enforcing and educating American governmental agencies, corporations and citizens about the need and benefits of privacy protections.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent historical overview of the evolution of the legal concept of privacy along with the technological innovations that drive it. We don't think of the inherent lack of privacy in telegraph messages or the prohibition against opening our mail. The book was written pre-Snowden so I am certain the conclusions might have been different now that we know the extent to which the government has completely eroded our privacy.

[Ryan Ballard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great overview of the history of privacy in American law. I found the last couple of chapters on the rise of computers and data mining and the effects on personal information most interesting. One of his central observations is that the The internet has increased the amount of public information a person is willing to share, the geographical spread of that information, the value of one piece of information due to the ability to aggregate, and the economic value of such information to the platforms that collect it. The fourth point means there is an economic incentive to collect as much personal information about consumers as possible, often without their explicit consent or knowledge. The fact I read this book and I am posting it on a social media platforms means “they” now have one more data point they can put in their digital dossier about me.

[Seth Garrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting read. Poor scholarship. With a two page long "selected" bibliography and no footnotes or citations, this author's claims are virtually impossible to fact check. Replete with interesting but ultimately tangential historical events that the author does not link to privacy concerns in any direct or abstract way (e.g. a significant foray into the history of the development of the invention and implementation of the US Census Bureau's electronic counting machine).

It would be helpful if a definition of the term "privacy" were explicitly introduced in the introduction or first chapter, even if only to be updated and revisited as the chronological historical narrative is reviewed.