Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet
- Book Review,
by Robert Ellis Smith
William Safire, columnist, The New York Times, December 30, 1999
"Robert Ellis Smith's expose of privacy invasion will be one of the sleeper best-selling books..."
Columbia University Privacy Expert Alan F. Westin
"A delightful read for everyone in business, government, the legal professions, and academia who wants historical insights."
The Federal Lawyer, August 2000 (Attorney Jeremiah S. Gutman)
"A historical and anecdotal style that should appeal to readers of all kinds, from the casually curious to the legally sophsticated."
Seattle Weekly
"An all-fact fiesta. A must-read. To enhance your beach-reading experience, Smith does a fabulous job of explaining...
Wall Street Journal (Robert Templer) Oct. 30, 2000
"The most practical of [the new privacy books], with its mix of readable history and sensible advice on what to do about your own privacy."
Reason magazine, October 2000
"an engaging and exhaustive historical survey"
Stanford Law Review
"A superb account."
DM News, July 5, 2004, Columnist Robert Gellman
"Still the best and most readable all-purpose introduction to privacy history, policy and law"
Computer Security Report, June 2004, Columnist Rebecca Herold
"Interesting and illuminating."
Simson Garfinkel, in Database Nation, published by O'Reilly, 2000
"His numerous books are required reading for anyone concerned about the ongoing threats."
Book Description
This new book explores the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug between Americans' yearning for privacy and their insatiable curiosity. The book describes Puritan monitoring in Colonial New England, then shows how the attitudes of the founders placed the concept of privacy in the Constitution. This panoramic view continues with the coming of tabloid journalism in the Nineteenth Century, and the reaction to it in the form of a new right - the right to privacy. The book includes histories of wiretapping, of credit reporting, of sexual practices, of Social Security numbers and ID cards, of modern principles of privacy protection, and of the coming of the Internet and the new challenges to personal privacy it brings. "Robert Ellis Smith's expose of privacy invasion will be one of the sleeper best-selling books..." wrote columnist William Safire in The New York Times, December 1999. "His numerous books are required reading for anyone concerned about the ongoing threats," said Simson Garfinkel in Database Nation, 2000. Here's a chapter-by-chapter description: "Watchfulness" describes church monitoring in the Colonial period. "Serenity" shows the craving for solitude by our founders, which shaped the rights they enshrined in the Constitution. "Mistrust" recounts early battles over confidentiality in the Post Office, the Census, and Western Union. "Space" describes the quest for privacy in living arrangements (including the first moves to suburbia after the Civil War) and the lack of privacy on Southern plantations. "Curiosity" traces the epic development of sensational journalism in the Nineteenth Century. "Brandeis" chronicles how Louis Brandeis reacted to gossip journalism and other new technology by "inventing" a legal right to privacy. "Wiretaps" is the story of electronic surveillance from the invention of the telephone to the 1970s. "Sex" traces changing attitudes towards sexual privacy over two centuries, and provides a chronicle of a Clintonesque sex scandal that changed attitudes forever after the 1880s. "Torts" describes court battles that eventually provided great latitude for gossip journalism. "The Constitution" is a remarkable new look at the very narrow decisions of the Supreme Court that shaped the very narrow Constitutional protections for privacy in the Twenty-first Century. "Numbers" tells for the first time where Social Security numbers came from and how they are used now, and describes subtle political efforts to create a universal identity document in the U.S. "Databanks" provides histories of credit reporting, database marketing, and government record keeping from the 1950s to the present. "Cyberspace" is a look back at the overnight development of the World Wide Web and its impact on personal privacy. Lastly, the epilogue entitled "Ben Franklin's Web Site" offers specific tips for protecting your privacy. It is modern guidance that Ben Franklin himself would have provided on his Web site.
From the Author
"In the course of writing and publishing a monthly newsletter about the right to privacy, I have practiced the advice attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: "Go out and see for yourself. Make others see what you've seen." This book is the product of that endeavor. Since 1974 when I began publishing Privacy Journal newsletter, writing books on the subject, and advocating increased recognition of the right to privacy, I have been accumulating lots of files. In one of those folders marked "History of Privacy," I kept items like the one about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover complaining about clandestine sex in the motor courts of the 1930s. Then I found an intriguing observation from the French humorist Paul Blouet late in the Nineteenth Century about the typical American, "Meeting you in a railway carriage, he will ask you point blank where you are going, what you are doing, and where you are from. By degrees, he grows bolder." At that point I formed the idea for a book on the history of privacy. But this story is about more than privacy. (Secretly, I have long felt that Americans are a little bit nervous about the subject - and probably reluctant to read a whole book about privacy.) Nearly all other books about privacy assume that this is a positive value shared by all Americans. I'm not sure that it is. Our feelings about personal privacy - our privacy and everyone else's - are ambivalent. To understand why, you have to look to all aspects of our culture. When you do, you discover that we value our curiosity more than our privacy."
From the Back Cover
When you explore the hidden niches of American history you discover the tug between our yearning for privacy and our insatiable curiosity. The author, Robert Ellis Smith, has published Privacy Journal newsletter since 1974. He is a journalist and a lawyer who has become a respected advocate for increased privacy protection and an expert in credit reporting, electronic surveillance, medical confidentiality, and all aspects of personal privacy. His first book, Privacy: How to Protect What's Left of It, was nominated for an American Book Award. "Smith's practical advice and cool exterior belie his passion. Some have called him 'the Ralph Nader of privacy,'" according to Dana Hawkins, in U.S. News & World Report, October 1999. BEN FRANKLIN'S WEB SITE is published by Privacy Journal, PO Box 28577, Providence RI 02908 USA, privacyjournal@prodigy.net
About the Author
Robert Ellis Smith has edited and published the monthly newsletter PRIVACY JOURNAL since 1974. A journalist and an attorney, Smith has long been recognized as an advocate for more privacy protection. He has testified frequently before Congressional committees, regulatory bodies, and state legislative bodies and has appeared on the major network television programs. A graduate of Harvard College, he began his career as a news reporter for daily newspapers including the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. After that, he was assistant director of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. Twice he has been asked to write the definition of privacy for The World Book Encyclopedia. Smith's first book, Privacy: How to Protect What's Left of It, was nominated for an American Book Award in 1980. Since then he has written Workrights, Our Vanishing Privacy, and a series of privacy reference books including Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws. These titles are also available at amazon.com. He is a frequent expert witness in court cases and legislative hearings involving individual privacy. Smith has been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, a member of the Human Rights Commission in the District of Columbia, and vice chair of the Coastal Resources Management Council in Rhode Island. Privacy Journal was established in Washington, D.C., and is now based in Providence, Rhode Island.
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