Skillful chart of a surveillance society out of control. The question is: Who will snoop on the snoopers, and what laws will...
Washington Post reporter O’Harrow investigates the possibilities of maintaining privacy protections in the wake of increased surveillance after 9/11. At this date, the picture is grim.
“The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people,” he writes. Databases and dossiers, surveillance cameras, biometrics, even “non-invasive neuro-electric sensors”: the information highway meets national insecurity. From Starbucks to the subway to the sidewalk, you are being watched, every electronic transaction recorded. Your personal identification material, your eating and sexual preferences, your family history are all probably on a chip somewhere, easily accessible. Personal data is now a full-blown commodity, bought and sold like sow bellies. Although O’Harrow voices a clear concern over the ethics of such snooping, he concentrates on the nature and tools of data collection, persuasively delineating how that information is abused and how unavoidable mistakes have profound consequences. Exacerbating this problem is the rising incidence of identity theft, thanks to the ease with which databases can be accessed. With visions of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy dancing in his head, O’Harrow is deeply wary of John Ashcroft’s desire to gut the Privacy Act of 1974. He keeps a level tone, never getting frantic, but then he doesn't have to. The horror stories speak for themselves: people whose credit ratings have been destroyed because of foul-ups, people who have been arrested because they happened to have the same name as a criminal, people grilled by security personnel because they fit a certain profile, political activists tagged as “criminal extremists.” In each case, O'Harrow shows, it was a Sisyphean task to get the records set straight—and forget about an apology.
Skillful chart of a surveillance society out of control. The question is: Who will snoop on the snoopers, and what laws will keep them in check?Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5480-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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