The End of Privacy : How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality

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Reviews
Amazon.com
The End of Privacy is a book about power--more specifically, it discusses surveillance as a powerful mechanism of social control. Philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault developed the concept of the "panopticon," an ideal prison where compliance with rules is guaranteed through complete and inescapable surveillance. Applying the principles involved to real-world examples that trace the development of surveillance technologies from Second World War military intelligence to the electronic data-veillance of the information revolution, Whitaker provides a thorough analysis of how our society may be gradually approaching panopticism.

Thanks to dramatic technological advances, surveillance monitoring can now provide nearly global coverage, exposing the everyday lives of ordinary people--in the workplace, at school, on the Internet, everywhere--to serve public, private, and prurient interests. Today, Whitaker notes, private-information brokers amass databases for an innumerable variety of commercial purposes--from credit reporting to mass marketing. Vast amounts of detailed personal information, including seemingly useless minutiae, end up in corporate hands. Orwell's monolithic Big Brother has fragmented into a myriad of Little Brothers, which add up to a powerful system with little or no accountability. Who, Whitaker asks, watches the watchers? --Tim Hogan

Book Description
An expert on government intelligence exposes new and pervasive methods of surveillance of private citizens. The Information Revolution and the rise of the networked society are reconstituting the structures of power on a global scale. In The End of Privacy, Reg Whitaker, a leading expert on government surveillance, shows that these developments pose dramatic new threats to personal privacy. Whitaker explains that, far beyond questions about the security of e-mail, the technology is in place to allow employers to monitor workers' every move throughout the workday, and the U.S. Treasury to track every detail of personal and business finances. As consumers, citizens are even more vulnerable. From the familiar--bar coding, credit and debit cards, and marketing and credit data banks--to the seemingly sci-fi--"smart cards" that encode every detail of a person's life, such as medical and criminal records, and security scans that read individuals' DNA--Whitaker shows how vast amounts of personal information are moving into private hands. Once there, they can be used to develop electronic pictures of individuals and groups that are potentially far more detailed, and far more intrusive, than the files built up in the past by state police and security agencies. Nineteenth-century penologists theorized an ideal prison which they named the Panopticon--a system of complete and total surveillance. The End of Privacy is the most thorough analysis yet of just how close we are coming to living in a virtual Panopticon.

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