Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (In a chapter titled "The Eclipse of Humanism," Harcourt write, "The birth of the expository society has gone hand in hand with a gradual erosion of the analog values we once prized--privacy, autonomy, some anonymity, secrecy, dignity, a room of one's own, the right to be let alone. Commenting on a survey of British consumers--which found that most respondents 'were happy to have companies use their personal data, on the condition that they receive something in return'--Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericsson note that 'privacy is now less a line in the sand beyond which transgression is not permitted, than a shifting space of negotiation where privacy is traded for products, better service or special deals.' Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg infamously remarked in 2010 that privacy is no longer really the social norm. Truth is, most Americans have reacted little to the Snowdon revelations and the stories of social media and corporate surveillance. [] Many of us have become complacent today--that is, when we are not actively craving publicity, or learning to love what we can't do without. We have gotten accustomed to the commodification of what D.A. Miller refers to as that 'integral autonomous, "secret" self'. Whereas we once viewed privacy and dignity as necessary ingredients for a fulfilling life, as basic human needs, as the psychic equivalent of air and water, today we tend to view them as market goods, as commodities that are to be brought or sold in a marketplace, This has coincided with a larger shift toward a neoliberal worldview, in which market rationalities dominate every sphere of life, including the social and the personal. We have begun to think of ourselves, more and more, as calculating, rational actors pushing our self-interest by means of cost-benefit analyses that covert practically every good into commoditized form. This way of thinking and behaving has had tangible effects, not least on our valuation of privacy, autonomy, and anonymity." Id. at 166-167. From the book jacket: "Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers. Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care." Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes if so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society--a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual." "We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary, we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience--or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage." It is too late. Don't you think?).
Charlie Savage, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("Even as Congress was struggling mightily to deal with the bulk phone records program, a sneaking suspicion arose that the fight might be the proverbial bright shiny object, distracting attention away from far more significant surveillance programs. One person voicing that warning was John Napier Tye, a former head of the State Department's Internet Freedom section. [] Tye became intently focused on what he believed was a major issue being overlooked in the debate. Despite all the attention to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, most of the content and metadata the agency was sucking in took place under the looser rules of Executive Order 12333. That framework--in which the agency is relatively heavily regulated when operating on domestic soil but has a free hand when operating abroad--was designed in and for an era when domestic communications stayed on the domestic network. That era is over. Among other things, Silicon Valley firms like Google and Yahoo now routinely store redundant backup copies of their customers' e-mail accounts in data centers abroad. [] The important thing to remember is that the NSA already had legal, front-door access to foreigners' Yahoo and Google accounts without a warrant under the FISA Amendments Act and the court-approved rules of the Prism system. But FISA, even the warrantless variety, required targeted collection of specific users' data. The NSA's clandestine overseas ingestion of user data from the same companies, especially at the volumes the documents indicated, strongly suggested that it was exploiting the looser rules of Executive Order 12333 to use bulk content collection techniques FISA generally forbids on domestic soil. It's not clear how much of that involved the accounts of foreigners versus Americans; the NSA likely had no idea either." Id. at 620-621.).
