Fred H. Cate

Electronic information networks offer extraordinary advantages to business, government, and individuals in terms of power, capacity, speed, accessibility, and cost. But these same capabilities present substantial privacy issues. With an unprecedented amount of data available in digital format, others know more about you than ever before. Data routinely collected includes your health, credit, marital, educational, and employment histories; the times and telephone numbers of every call you make and receive; the magazines you subscribe to and the books your borrow from the library; your cash'"withdrawals; your purchases by credit card or check; where you go on the Internet. Governments have responded to these new challenges to personal privacy in a wide variety of ways. At one extreme, the European Union in 1995 enacted sweeping regulation to protect personal information; at the other extreme, privacy law in the United States and many other countries is fragmented, inconsistent, and offers little protection for privacy on the Internet and other electronic networks. For all the passion that surrounds discussions about privacy, surprisingly little consensus exists about what privacy means, what values are served -- or compromised -- by extending further legal protection, and what principles should undergird a sensitive balancing of those values.

Privacy in the Information Age

James X. Dempsey

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book is the culmination of nearly six years of research initiated by Fred Cate and Jim Dempsey to examine national practices and laws regarding systematic government access to personal information held by private-sector companies. Leading an effort sponsored by The Privacy Projects, they commissioned a series of country reports, asking national experts to uncover what they could about government demands on telecommunications providers and other private-sector companies to disclose bulk information about their customers. Their initial research found disturbing indications of systematic access in countries around the world. These data collection programs, often undertaken in the name of national security, were cloaked in secrecy and largely immune from oversight, posing serious threats to personal privacy. After the Snowden leaks confirmed these initial findings, the project morphed into something more ambitious: an effort to explore what should be the rules for government access to private-sector data, and how companies should respond to government demands for access. This book contains twelve updated country reports plus eleven analytic chapters that present descriptive and normative frameworks for assessing national surveillance laws, survey evolving international law and human rights principles applicable to government surveillance, and describe oversight mechanisms. It also explores the concept of accountability and the role of encryption in shaping the surveillance debate. Cate and Dempsey conclude by offering recommendations for both governments and industry.

Systematic Government Access to Private-sector Data

Bulk Collection

Marc A. Franklin

David A. Anderson

This is a book about media law, not a book about the First Amendment. Media law has many sources other than the First Amendment. The law of defamation & invasion of privacy is largely state common law. A reporter's privilege to refuse to disclose confidences is controlled in many states by statutes. Open-meetings & open-records statutes determine the outcome of most controversies over press access to government information. Broadcast regulation is largely accomplished by federal statutes & Federal Communications Commission regulations. Mass Media Law, Sixth Edition explores these sources in a thought-provoking manner that will add to class discussion.

Fred H. Cate

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