A World without Privacy: What Law Can and Should Do?
by Austin Sarat (Editor)
Recent revelations about America's National Security
Agency offer a stark reminder of the challenges posed by the rise of the
digital age for American law. These challenges refigure the meaning of autonomy
and the meaning of the word "social" in an age of new modalities of
surveillance and social interaction, as well as new reproductive technologies
and the biotechnology revolution. Each of these developments seems to portend a
world without privacy, or at least a world in which the meaning of privacy is
radically transformed, both as a legal idea and a lived reality. Each requires
us to rethink the role that law can and should play in responding to today's
threats to privacy. Can the law keep up with emerging threats to privacy? Can
it provide effective protection against new forms of surveillance? This book
offers some answers to these questions. It considers several 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.
