Barbara Fister writes about privacy and government secrecy in the wake of the exposure of the government’s “Prism” program and other surveillance activities.
- Ordinary Americans, by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (June 10, 2013).
The effects of government secrecy on the privacy of Americans and its overlap with libraries and the Right to Read has a long history. In recent decades we have had the FBI’s “Library Awareness Program” (See Surveillance in the Stacks The FBI’s Library Awareness Program By Herbert N. Foerstel, Greenwood Press. Westport, Conn. 1991), the “PATRIOT” Act with its library-records clause, the “Total Information Awareness” program, the “Terrorist Surveillance Act,” and more.
Fister quotes from the Church committee hearings of the 1970s. Her article is worth a read.
See more about privacy here on FGI:
- PRIVACY: Key Challenges Facing Federal Agencies (2006)
- Privacy and the “Terrorist Surveillance Act” (2006)
The “Terrorist Surveillance Act” is misnamed. It doesn’t authorize the government to spy on terrorists, it authorizes the government to spy on everyone hoping that it can find terrorists.
- Turkle on Privacy (2007)
- Privacy: “I have nothing to hide” (2007)
- Siva on Privacy and ‘the Nonopticon’ (2008)
- Privacy: “I have nothing to hide” (2011)
- Privacy in the value chain: an important role for libraries past and future (2011)
- Privacy then and now: Some history of the “Patriot” Act (2011)
- more…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.