YNOT — The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has selected American Privacy: The 400-Year-History of Our Most Contested Right as its Book of the Month for November. American Privacy, which is due for release by Beacon Press Nov. 23, is the fifth book by Frederick S. Lane, an author, attorney, expert witness and lecturer based in Burlington, Vermont.Lane is familiar to members of the adult entertainment industry from his numerous appearances as a panelist and moderator at industry trade shows and from the articles about First Amendment issues he has penned for industry trade publications.
Lane has not given up panel moderation. To launch the book, he moderated for The Bostonian Society a discussion about current domestic surveillance programs. Joining him on the panel were Prof. John Bell, a specialist in Revolutionary history; John McEtterik, a law professor at Suffolk University, who is an expert on the general writs of assistance issued by the British crown, and Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation and one of the key players in the ongoing litigation regarding the National Security Agency’s secret domestic wiretapping program.
The ABFFE is the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship. Founded by the American Booksellers Association in 1990, ABFFE’s mission is to promote and protect the free exchange of ideas, particularly those contained in books, by opposing restrictions on the freedom of speech. In that pursuit, it issuess statements on significant free expression controversies, participates in legal cases involving First Amendment rights, collaborates with other groups with an interest in free speech and provides education about the importance of free expression to booksellers, other members of the book industry, politicians, the press and the public. The organization’s Book of the Month feature is an effort to help publicize important books about free speech.
Lane and others feel current trends in politics and social structures lately have placed people’s private lives under ever-increasing scrutiny from the boardroom to the bedroom. Along with advancements in technology have come advancements in the ability of the government to pry, he told the ABFFE during a Q&A session.
“For most individuals, the real struggle over personal privacy did not begin until the introduction of technology that made it possible for privacy to be easily invaded,” Lane said. “The camera is the most graphic example of that, an invention that led directly to the proposal of a ‘right to privacy’ by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis. But others quickly followed, including the telephone, the credit card, and eventually, computers.
“We should care about privacy because it is a measure of our autonomy in the world,” he added. “Perhaps in some ideal world, there would be total and complete transparency, and information would not have the power that it does today. But information does have power, and that power can be misused by governments, organizations, and even individuals. We should defend privacy because what we are actually preserving is our ability to control, within reason, what information we share with people in various aspects of our lives.”
In Lane’s view, privacy is too easy to lose or give away without intending to do so. Apart from government, Lane feels commerce and reality television represent larger threats than one might imagine, even to people who think they are cautious with their personal details.
“…[B]usinesses are desperately seeking ways to profitably advertise in our increasingly-wired world, and the general assumption is that the more information a business knows about someone, the more targeted — and thus cost-effective — an advertisement can be,” he told the ABFFE. “The ultimate objective is to serve an advertisement to a person at the precise moment they are most likely to want to make the purchase. That objective hinges in large part on knowing where someone is, either on the Web (through the use of cookies) or in the real world (through tracking of GPS signals). As consumers, we all too often opt into this scenario for ridiculously low rewards: a coupon here, a discount there. We are far too complicit in corporate efforts to invade our privacy.
“And that’s particularly true online. I cite reality TV shows as a metaphor for the Warholian desire for our 15 minutes of fame. It is astounding the information, photos and videos of themselves that people post online, with no real appreciation for how difficult — read “impossible” — it is to retrieve anything from the Web. Initially, of course, an argument can be made that when people choose to post things about themselves online, they are exercising autonomy and control and are free to publicize whatever aspects of their lives they want. The problem, of course, is that control of the information quickly vanishes, and online information can be used in ways people don’t anticipate. Moreover, we often can’t control the information other people post about us….”
Ultimately Lane believes privacy will continue to exist, if not quite in the form we might like to see the concept take. He just wants people to be aware they may not be as “invisible” as they would like to think.
“…[I]t is useful talk about privacy in the context of controlling information — what can we do to enhance and protect our ability to control the release and spread of information,” Lane told the ABFFE. “In part, that’s a call for personal responsibility: We each need to stop and think about whether we really need a five-cent coupon in exchange for letting a grocery store track our purchases throughout the year. But even more importantly, I think the control of personal information is a sufficiently large issue to merit government regulation. We’ve done it before, with food, and medicine, and the environment. We can do the same thing with the control of personal information. Let’s create a Federal Privacy Protection Agency that is committed to effectively regulating government and corporate collection and use of private information, and that can educate the public about the risks of broadcasting too much, too often.”
For more about American Privacy, visit Beacon’s website.
