Friday, July 18, 2014

Six notable books on surveillance

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of six top books on surveillance:
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin

"One of Verizon's first customers is the Phoenix Suns basketball team, which wants to know where its fans live. Scott Horowitz, a team vice president, said: 'This is the information that everyone has wanted that hasn't been available until now.' " That's Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Julia Angwin, as she expertly diagnoses one of surveillance's greatest ironies: the degree to which we so often volunteer private information in the name of our own convenience, and the intense marketability and profitability of the companies who buy and sell customer data with ease. If surveillance is a growing concern, argues Angwin, we might first begin to address increasing fears first by acknowledging our own degree of culpability as voracious consumers.
Read about another book on the list.

Also see Seth Rosenfeld's five top books on the surveillance state.

--Marshal Zeringue