Technology of Oppression: Preserving Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless Surveillance

In the wake of the National Security Agency expose of 2013, scholars and citizens alike have been turning a critical eye toward United States surveillance policies. Technology of Oppression contributes to this ongoing discussion with a systematic analysis of mass surveillance in America and allied countries, detailing how lax intelligence laws have allowed these technologies to undermine common civil liberties. Toward the practical end of reigning in existing surveillance technologies, Cohen offers a concise proposal listing the policy changes and software developments necessary to establish an internet-based, global forum for transparently affecting legal and technological change.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why Privacy Matters 1. A History of the Mass Warrantless Surveillance Network 2. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law 3. Network Searches and Applications 4. Transparency of Policies and Practices 5. Democracy in Cyberspace 6. Next Generation Technologies 7. The Technological Imperative 8. Network Surveillance Regulations

About the Author :
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. specializes in information technology and mass media ethics. His many published works include Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project (2010). Author of several technology patents related to the protection of electronic privacy, he has written extensively on foreign intelligence surveillance law.

Review :
"Technology has long been touted as a great liberating tool that will improve life. Instead, as Elliot Cohen trenchantly details, invasive hi-technology has become a cancerous growth that invades privacy and creates a surveillance state. Fortunately, Cohen suggests strategies to rein in the perilous danger of a government that can monitor our every move - and perhaps soon our thoughts." -Mark Karlin, Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout "Technology of Oppression features the importance of preserving human freedom and dignity in the face of mass surveillance by governments and corporations. We are faced with the loss of nothing less than our cognitive liberty to be independent thinking human beings. Elliot Cohen is the Paul Revere of the 21st century and we all need to pay heed." -Peter Phillips, Ph.D., President of the Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored "Today massive surveillance technologies threaten our privacy and our freedom. In this book, Elliot Cohen offers a set of workable, practical regulations to save us from a future that is almost too scary to imagine." -James P. Sterba, University of Notre Dame, USA