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American Privacy: The 400-Year History of Our Most Contested Right Paperback – January 11, 2011
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“The history of America is the history of the right to privacy,” writes Frederick S. Lane in this vivid and penetrating exploration of our most hotly debated constitutional right. From Governor William Bradford opening colonists’ mail bound for England, to President George W. Bush’s expansive domestic wiretapping, the motivations behind government surveillance have changed little despite rapid advances in communications technology. Yet all too often, American citizens have been their own worst enemies when it comes to protecting privacy, compliantly forgoing civil liberties in extreme times of war as well as for everyday consumer conveniences. Each of us now contributes to an ever-evolving electronic dossier of online shopping sprees, photo albums, health records, and political contributions, accessible to almost anyone who cares to look. In a digitized world where data lives forever, Lane urges us to consider whether privacy is even a possibility. How did we arrive at this breaking point?
American Privacy traces the lineage of cultural norms and legal mandates that have swirled around the Fourth Amendment since its adoption. In 1873, the introduction of postcards split American opinion of public propriety. Over a century later, Twitter takes its place on the spectrum of human connection. Between these two nodes, Anthony Comstock waged a moral crusade against obscene literature, George Orwell penned 1984, Joseph McCarthy hunted Communists and “perverts,” President Richard Nixon surveilled himself right out of office, and the Supreme Court of the United States issued its most influential legal opinions concerning the right to privacy to date. Captured here, these historic snapshots add up to a lively narration of privacy’s champions and challengers.
Legally, technologically, and historically grounded, American Privacy concludes with a call for Congress to recognize how innovation and infringement go hand-in-hand, and a challenge to citizens to protect privacy before it is lost completely.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBeacon Press
- Publication dateJanuary 11, 2011
- Dimensions6.03 x 0.76 x 8.98 inches
- ISBN-10080700619X
- ISBN-13978-0807006191
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“American Privacy is a deeply informed discussion of the history and present state of a fundamental American value. Frederick Lane’s detailed account of the attacks against our basic right to privacy is chilling.”—Craig Newmark, founder, craigslist
“From its humble beginnings as the right of citizens to not have their houses, papers, and persons searched without warrant, to the complex laws and regulations that we have today, Lane’s book lays out what our privacy is and how easily it can be compromised from all sides.”—Jonathon Howard, Sacramento Book Review
“Frederick Lane’s timely and lucid history lays bare how attacks on privacy by government and industry threaten democracy itself. Essential reading.”—Christopher M. Finan, author of From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The headline for the lead story in the New York Times on December 16, 2005, was stunning in its starkness and simplicity: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without Courts.”
Underneath the column-spanning banner was a massive 3,300- word story, written by veteran reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, describing in detail a decision by President George W. Bush to authorize the National Security Agency (NSA) to listen to the conversations of American citizens and others inside the United States without first seeking court permission to do so. According to the Times story, “under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible ‘dirty numbers’ linked to Al Qaeda.”
Following the 9/11 attacks, the NSA intensified its tracking of calls and e-mails to and from known Al Qaeda figures, aided in large part by Central Intelligence Agency seizure of terrorists’ cell phones and computers in the Middle East. With President Bush’s executive order in hand, the NSA for the first time began also tracking domestic phone calls and e-mails of people, including U.S. citizens, suspected of having links to Al Qaeda, regardless of how remote those links might be.
Based on interviews with unnamed former and current members of the administration, the Times reported that at any given moment, the NSA was monitoring the communications of up to five hundred Americans. Since the names on the NSA surveillance list shifted over time, however, the Times said that the total number of Americans targeted since the domestic eavesdropping program was launched “may have reached into the thousands.”
Ten days later, after the Bush administration admitted that the NSA had conducted warrantless surveillance of “several hundred” Americans, the Los Angeles Times published a story, under the headline “U.S. Spying Is Much Wider, Some Suspect,” in which various security experts suggested that the NSA was actually conducting wholesale, “look-at-everything” surveillance. As the Los Angeles Times itself conceded, the article and its conclusions were largely speculative, since none of the surveillance experts interviewed had any specific evidence regarding the full extent of the NSA’s domestic spying program.
But the quintessential “black” agency was about to get a little bit grayer. It turned out that the NSA was in fact “looking at everything,” or at least had the opportunity to do so.
The Room that Wasn’t There
Information about the secretive National Security Agency has been notoriously difficult to obtain since the agency was quietly established by President Truman in 1952. The existence of the agency itself didn’t actually remain a secret for all that long: the following summer, the New York Times reported that the Defense Department was launching a $30 million construction project to build a new home for the agency at Fort Meade in Maryland. But little information was available about what the agency would do in its new home.
“The National Security Agency,” the Times said, “which functions under the Defense Department, runs a super-communications network, monitoring and translating broadcasts from all parts of the world. Its services are used not only by the Defense Department, but also by the State Department, the C.I.A., the White House and other Government units.”
The specific nature of the services provided by the NSA to other branches of the government was classified at the time and remains so today. Nonetheless, the veil that has long shrouded the agency has thinned somewhat, particularly during the last couple of decades. The NSA received its largest (unwelcome) publicity boost in 2000, when a committee of the European Parliament issued a report outlining a global program of signals intelligence, code-named ECHELON, that is reportedly operated by the NSA on behalf of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Using a combination of satellite, telephone, and microwave intercepts, the ECHELON program enables the NSA to review the contents of millions of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and text messages sent to and from devices around the world. The European Parliament cautioned, however, that “the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed.”
When President Bush freed the NSA from its warrant requirements under federal law, the NSA decided to take a more straightforward approach: directly intercepting the data transmissions flowing through the nation’s largest and busiest telecommunications companies. In January 2003, an AT&T communications technician named Marty Klein noticed that a new room was being built next to AT&T’s 4ESS switching equipment in the San Francisco office in which he worked. The switching equipment, Klein later told Wired magazine’s Ryan Singel, handles all long-distance and international calls. Klein subsequently learned that the person setting up the equipment in the new room had been recruited the previous fall by the NSA.
Not long after the NSA’s arrival at AT&T, Klein was assigned to connect the company’s massive Internet circuits to a so-called “splitting cabinet,” which contained a beam splitter that divided the Internet traffic into two identical streams, one of which flowed into the NSA’s secret room. The diverted data stream was not limited to just AT&T’s customers; thanks to peer sharing agreements among the various companies operating Internet backbones, NSA’s secret room captured data carried on AT&T’s network from other telecommunications companies. Klein said that similar setups were installed in other AT&T switching offices, “including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.”
Among other things, Klein reported, the secret room was equipped with a Narus STA 6400, a supercomputer that is part of the NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS). In a product description on the Narus Web site, the company says that the NIS “provides service providers and government organizations unmatched flexibility to intercept IP [Internet protocol] communications content and/or identifying information, enabling law enforcement and government organizations around the world to effectively gather evidence of illegal activity in the multi-faceted world of IP communications.” In simpler terms, the NIS is designed to collect huge amounts of data from various types of data networks and apply so-called “semantic traffic analysis” to determine whether any of the traffic contains information of interest to the organization collecting the data. Since 2004, the Narus board of directors has included William P. Crowell, an “independent security consultant” whose prior positions include deputy director of operations and deputy director of the National Security Agency.
While the Narus Web page for the NIS stresses the importance of capturing “all targeted data but nothing else,” it leaves unanswered the thornier question of what constraints exist, if any, for determining whose data should be targeted. It was no accident that the European Parliament opened its report on the NSA ECHELON program by quoting the first-century Roman poet Juvenal: “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” (But who will guard the guardians?)
Product details
- Publisher : Beacon Press; 59969th edition (January 11, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 080700619X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0807006191
- Item Weight : 1.02 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.03 x 0.76 x 8.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,406,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #921 in Civil Rights Law (Books)
- #2,190 in Legal History (Books)
- #2,893 in Law Specialties (Books)
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About the author

I am an author, attorney, expert witness, and professional speaker on the legal and cultural implications of emerging technology. After graduating from Amherst College and Boston College Law School, I 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 my first book, Vermont Jury Instructions -- Civil and Criminal (with John Dinse and Ritchie Berger), I launched a computer consulting business that in time led to my current work as a computer forensics expert and author.
In response to the passage of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, I began researching the legislative and media response to the rise of the online adult industry. The resulting book, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age, was the first of what is now nine mainstream non-fiction books. The others are:
The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy (Amacom 2003);
The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture (Prometheus Books 2006);
The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court (Beacon Press 2008); and, most recently,
American Privacy: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Our Most Contested Right (Beacon Press 2009);
Cybertraps for the Young (NTI Upstream 2011);
Cybertraps for Educators (Mathom Press 2015); and
Cybertraps for Expecting Moms & Dads (Mathom Press 2016).
In addition to these books, I have written numerous magazine articles on a variety of topics, including constitutional rights (particularly freedom of speech), privacy online and in the workplace, the impact of technology on our rights and liberties, and the separation of church and state.
On August 23, 2006, I had the honor of appearing on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" to discuss The Decency Wars. I have also appeared as a guest on a variety of other national television programs, including ABC's "Good Morning America Weekend," NBC's "Weekend Today," ABC's "Nightline," CBS's "60 Minutes," and assorted BBC documentaries. In addition to those televised appearances, I have been interviewed by numerous radio shows, magazines, and newspapers around the world on topics relating to my books.
Over the last fifteen years, I have frequently been invited to lecture before college, university, and professional audiences to lecture on Internet technology, workplace and personal privacy, computer forensics, and censorship issues. I am represented by the Jodi R. Solomon Speakers Bureau in Boston, MA and Vermont Voices in Essex Junction, Vermont. An extensive list of recent lecture topics is available through the menu listing at the top of the page.
In my capacity as an expert witness in the field of computer forensics, I have worked on pornography and obscenity-related litigation for a variety of clients, including the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the City of Charlotte, N.C., assorted businesses, and individual defendants.
I live in Brooklyn, NY with my partner, Dr. Amy Werbel; together, we are the parents of four boys. From October 2002 to March 2012, I served on the Burlington (VT) School Board. I chaired the Board's Finance subcommittee from 2007 to 2010, served as Clerk of the Board from April 2003 through March 2009, and served as the chairman of the Board from 2010-2012. I also served as a member of the Board of Directors for Vermont Community Access Media, one of the region's three public access television stations.
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I meant to complete this review and evidently forgot. I did not intend to leave it as a crabby criticism of the author's common mistake of confusing th Pilgrims with the Puritans. I did go on to finish reading the book and was appalled to learn how much we have shared of ourselves without regard to public exposure. Lane's history of the U.S. census was especially enlightening. But in my current rage about Edward Snowden's revelations of government snooping, I--like millions of others--never gave a though to how much information about ME is out there for anyone to see. Living in a small town, I do most of my shopping on the internet or by mail catalog. My education records are out there in plain view through my K-12 school district and my university experience. I have been active in my community for more than 60 years and my name has appeared frequently in the local paper, both as "newsmaker" and writer of letters to the editor. Lane does a fine job of making the reader understand how casual and trusting we have been throughout our llives with our so-called "privacy". Joke on me.
Lane's treatment of this topic is intriguing and disturbing in its implications. It makes clear the dangers and reality of an Orwellian "big brother" data infrastructure. It also gives the reader much to think about as to how our daily actions may lend tacit approval to such practices by both the federal government and corporations. This is a fascinating and compelling book for all readers and another great read by Fred Lane.
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