INLS187 spring 2003

 Assignment 1:

 

Book Review

 

Li Chen

 

1.                Bibliography for the book:

 

In this assignment, I review a book, “The Transparent Society—will Technology Force Us choose between privacy and freedom?” written by David Brin. This book was published by Addison Wesley in 1998. ISBN 0-201-32802-X.

 

2.                What is this book about, who is it for, at what level of detail?

 

In this book, Brin presented points he has thought about the value of transparent in an increasing information age. Brin illustrated his opinions in various fields.

 

At first, Brin pointed out that devices used for detecting people already exist, and will better and cheaper than before. Simultaneously, with the Internet developing, people can obtain more and more information at shorter time and great distances. Brin agrees that developing of technology undermines human’s privacy and listed many security problems that private individuals would encounter such as “spying in the workplace”, “the commercialization of personal information”, “credit ratings”, “identity theft”, and so on. He said “the internet makes it easy to obtain personal information about other people”. (pp 57)

 

Brin also agrees that privacy is important and he likes privacy. However, it does not means that we should prevent from development although improvement lets us keep thrusting challenges our way. According to human history, from Stone era to current information era, human obtain benefit “with the fruits of science”.  Brin pointed out that little actual harm is done when privacy disappears; this is why most of people object the openness. But Brin presented tools of “openness and light that have served us well in the past”.  Brin also mentioned that although many countries adjusted laws to protect privacy, it still leaves many room in a lot of direction. In addition, we can pass law to protect our privacy, but our information was also collected by some companies and people who use methods we don’t know.

 

Brin believes that people control information is not only because of privacy but also because of revenue. According to many examples listed in this book, Brin agrees,  “the ongoing revolution in information technology is affecting older views of intellectual property”.  (pp 90)

 

Brin thought that cryptography does have its limitation in the real world, although a lot of privacy advocates encourage using cryptography to protect people privacy. He believed that an open society is safer than a close society because problems can be detected before they grow to big problems.

 

Like other eras, Brin believed that information ear also need a lone time to develop and improve. Obviously, Brin presented many examples to support that transparent society is a positive facet in the future. In page 242, Brin wrote:

“Obviously, any  group that is allowed to monopolize such techniques

will gain profound, possible permanent , advantages. Yet trying to

impede their arrival will be futile, like stopping the ocean tide with

fortifications made of beach sand. Hence, for the sake of both survival

and freedom, we may have to apply these tools universally—especially

on the might.”

But Brin alos pointed out that encryption is not very useful in real world. We can obtain this ideal form page 284:

“ In the long run, transparency will not thrive or fail because of the
meta-magical games played by encryption enthusiasts. The wizards
do not controls our fate, after all. There are just too many ways to go
around the math”.

 

All in all, Brin described two facts on transparency society: transparent society will reduce crime, but we will lost our privacy.  He thought that although transparent society has weakness it still better than a close society. We should find methods to solve problems during development of transparent society.

 

This book is easy to read. It does not require the reader with any background in information, computer, and mathematics’ science. The author shows his ideal clearly and uses very general examples to support his opinions.  In this book, examples are very interesting and easy to understand.

 

 

3.                Critique the book

 

This book is useful to obtain a correct point about information security in our real world.  According to the examples mention by Brin, we should constantly develop security technology with improvement of real world. Form the critical perspective; I do not think this book has weakness. Since Brin provided many facts to support his ideal. It is really a good book to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feb, 5, 2003