A World without Privacy

What Law Can and Should Do?

Austin Sarat

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107081215
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316213698
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Recent revelations about America's National Security Agency offer a reminder of the challenges posed by the rise of the digital age for American law. These challenges refigure the meaning of autonomy and of the word 'social' in an age of new modalities of surveillance and social interaction. Each of these developments seems to portend a world without privacy, or in which the meaning of privacy is transformed, both as a legal idea and a lived reality. Each requires us to rethink the role of law, can it keep up with emerging threats to privacy and provide effective protection against new forms of surveillance? This book offers some answers. It considers different understandings of privacy and provides examples of legal responses to the threats to privacy associated with new modalities of surveillance, the rise of digital technology, the excesses of the Bush and Obama administrations, and the continuing war on terror.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Whither Privacy? An Introduction
• 1 Four Privacy Myths
• 2 The Yes Men and The Women Men Don’t See
• 3 Enough About Me: Why Privacy is About Power, not Consent (or Harm)
• 4 What’s Wrong with Privacy Protections? Provocations from a Fifth Columnist
• Afterword: Responding to a World Without Privacy: On the Potential Merits of a Comparative Law Perspective
• Index