The world of data as illuminated here would have scared George Orwell.
The former Secretary of Homeland Security surveys the brave new world of data collection and analysis and finds that both the legal system and international relations have yet to keep pace with technology.
Chertoff (Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years, 2009), who has also served as a judge and a prosecutor, contrasts the present day with earlier eras when there was more of a strong distinction between public and private. An invasion of privacy once meant encroaching on one’s property, but technology has dissolved any expectation of privacy or even a sense of who is doing the encroaching and what is being encroached upon. We share our information freely despite the consequences, we depend on smartphones that track us everywhere and lack adequate safeguards, and we invite devices into our homes to monitor our preferences and activities. In an era of facial-recognition software, laws reflect the days when surveillance was by camera (before every phone had one) or phone tapping (on landlines). “When technology has dramatically expanded the ability to monitor activities in a previously unrecognizable way, we need a new set of laws,” writes the author, whose current company offers security consulting. He continues, “Inevitably, this will require tradeoffs between different values: privacy, autonomy, security, and the individual versus the collective interest.” Chertoff shows how such an initiative is necessary as well as extremely challenging, as the internet transcends borders of nations that have very different attitudes toward individual rights and as the process involves different stages of collecting and analyzing data, by governments and commercial concerns alike. Though the writing rarely rises above workmanlike, the author’s experience in these areas runs deep, and he shows reasons for concern in areas many readers might not have considered. “We frequently trade away our data for a short-term convenience or lower-cost gratification without realizing the long-term consequences,” he warns—until our insurance companies start monitoring our grocery purchases and restaurant preferences to determine how healthy our diets are.
The world of data as illuminated here would have scared George Orwell.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2793-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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