Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006)

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who’s really in control of what’s happening on the Net?

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
ISBN 0195152662, 9780195152661
226 pages

publisher
google books

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EDRi: Shadow evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) (2011)

In advance of the European Commission the publication of its long overdue evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive, EDRi has published its own “shadow report”. This Directive currently requires long-term indiscriminate storage of records of every electronic communication of every person in the European Union. European Digital Rights (EDRi), concludes in a parallel ‘shadow report’ that European citizens have gained nothing from the Data Retention Directive, but lost their privacy. EDRi urges the Commission to respect the Charter on Fundamental Rights and reject data retention in Europe.

Nothing gained
In its evaluation report, the Commission fails to prove that data retention is a necessary instrument to fight serious crime. The statistics provided by Member States indicate that the vast majority of data used by law enforcement authorities would also have been available without obligatory data retention. The absence of data retention legislation in countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic (where national Constitutional Courts rejected transposition laws of the Data Retention Directive as an unjustified restriction on fundamental rights) has not led to an increase in crime or a decrease in the ability to fight crime.

Privacy lost
Meanwhile, 500 million European citizens have been confronted with an unprecedented and unnecessary infringement of their fundamental rights. In 2010, the average European had their traffic and location data logged in a telecommunications database once every six minutes. According to the European Data Protection Supervisor, the Directive constitutes ‘the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the European Union’.
In addition, several Member States fail to fully respect the data security obligations of the Directive. Some do not even have a process for deleting the data after the retention periods, nor of overseeing this deletion. The Commission has accused unspecified Member States of breaches of legal process by exploiting domestic telecoms companies to obtain data from other EU Member States, thereby circumventing agreed legal procedures.
European citizens, and Europe’s hard won credibility for defending fundamental rights, have paid dearly for this Directive, both in terms of a reduction in the right to privacy and also in the chaotic and lawless treatment of personal data. The Commission report and our shadow report show that the Directive has failed on every level – it has failed to respect the fundamental rights of European citizens, it has failed to harmonise the European single market and it has failed as a necessary instrument to fight crime.”

What next?
The Commission’s evaluation report will serve as the basis for an impact assessment of policy options to annul or amend the Directive. EDRi will send its shadow report to the European Parliament, calling on its members to stand for the fundamental rights of 500 million EU citizens and repeal the Data Retention Directive.

Published by Digital Civil Rights in Europe on 17 April 2011

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Daniel J. Solove: The Digital Person. Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (2004)

Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, electronic databases are compiling information about you. As you surf the Internet, an unprecedented amount of your personal information is being recorded and preserved forever in the digital minds of computers. For each individual, these databases create a profile of activities, interests, and preferences used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. The creation and use of these databases—which Daniel J. Solove calls “digital dossiers”—has thus far gone largely unchecked. In this startling account of new technologies for gathering and using personal data, Solove explains why digital dossiers pose a grave threat to our privacy.

The Digital Person sets forth a new understanding of what privacy is, one that is appropriate for the new challenges of the Information Age. Solove recommends how the law can be reformed to simultaneously protect our privacy and allow us to enjoy the benefits of our increasingly digital world.

Publisher NYU Press, 2004
ISBN 0814798462, 9780814798461
283 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB, updated on 2013-2-14)