Today William Safire reviews two recent books on data privacy and security – Robert O’Harrow Jr.’s ”No Place to Hide” and ”Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping” by Patrick Radden Keefe (a third-year student at Yale Law).
Hair-raising title: “Goodbye to Privacy”, and hair-raising intro quote:
In the past five years, what most of us only recently thought of as ”nobody’s business” has become the big business of everybody’s business. Perhaps you are one of the 30 million Americans who pay for what you think is an unlisted telephone number to protect your privacy. But when you order an item using an 800 number, your own number may become fair game for any retailer who subscribes to one of the booming corporate data-collection services. In turn, those services may be — and some have been — penetrated by identity thieves.