EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense (2009)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions — it’s all about risk management — we’ll be answering those two questions for three types of data:

First, we’re going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records.

Second, we’re going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire — that is, your data as it’s being transmitted — posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement.

Third, we’re going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it.

In each of these three sections, we’re going to give you practical advice about how to protect your private data against law enforcement agents.

In a fourth section, we’ll also provide some basic information about the U.S. government’s expanded legal authority when it comes to foreign intelligence and terrorism investigations.

Finally, we’ve collected several articles about specific defensive technologies that you can use to protect your privacy, which are linked to from the other sections or can be accessed individually. So, for example, if you’re only looking for information about how to securely delete your files, or how to use encryption to protect the privacy of your emails or instant messages, you can just directly visit that article.

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Daniel J. Solove: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (2007)

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Published by Yale University Press, 2007
ISBN 0300124988, 9780300124989
247 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated 2011-2-18)

Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004–) [EN, ES, IT, HU, PL, CAT, ZH, DE, RU, PT, FR, CZ, KZ, NO]

“Lawrence Lessig argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.”

Publisher Penguin, 2004
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 License
ISBN 1594200068, 9781594200069
345 pages

Wikipedia

Free Culture (English, 2004)
Cultura libre (Spanish, 2004)
Cultura libera (Italian, 2005)
Szabad kultura (Hungarian, 2005)
Wolna kultura (Polish, 2005)
Cultura lliure (Catalan, 2005)
自由文化 (Chinese, 2006)
Freie Kultur (German, 2006)
Свободная Культура (Russian, 2007)
Cultura livre (Portuguese, 2007)
Culture libre (French, 2009)
Svobodná kultura (Czech, 2010)
Еркін мәдениет (Kazakh, 2012)
Fri kultur (Norwegian, 2015, other formats)