Welcome to the omnipticon.(Review)

Publication: Public Interest

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 The National Affairs, Inc.

PRIVACY has become an increasingly urgent issue for many Americans after September 11. The USA PATRIOT Act expanded the domestic surveillance powers of policing agencies and considerably enhanced their authority to track and monitor individuals. It is hardly surprising that in the new age of terror the government would be more aggressive in its efforts to acquire useful information, and nowadays the government has the technological know-how and apparently the public's approval to do so. But many sound the alarm, insisting that civil liberties are threatened by Big Brother. Within reason, such concerns have their place. Yet taken too far, they can obscure deeper social pressures that underlie privacy's demise--pressures that long predated the September 11 attacks.

In The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, ([dagger]) Jeffrey Rosen offers a thoughtful account of the questions we need to be asking as we assess the legal and law-enforcement responses to the terrorist threat. The author is a tough but fair critic of what he considers governmental overreaction to September 11. More importantly, Rosen limns the profound cultural and technological developments that probably made this overreaction all but inevitable.

A law professor at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of the New Republic, Rosen is well-placed to examine the novel threats to liberty and privacy that we face. In The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, published in 2000, Rosen considered threats to privacy resulting from a combination of computers, the Internet, and law-enforcement efforts to go after workplace discrimination and sexual harassment. Rosen's subject in both books is ultimately modernity in tension with itself: liberty and privacy standing against public inquisitiveness and the new technologies that help feed it.

PRIVACY is rooted firmly in the logic of liberalism. Arising from the social contractarian view of the state, privacy (or something like it) is also enshrined in the...

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