Are humans hard-wired to make good decisions about managing their privacy in an increasingly public world? Or are we helpless victims of surveillance through our use of invasive digital media? Exploring the chasm between the tyranny of surveillance and the ideal of privacy, this book traces the origins of personal data collection in digital technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in social network sites, search engines, mobile apps, the web, and email. The Future of Digital Surveillance argues against a technologically deterministic view—digital technologies by nature do not cause surveillance. Instead, the shaping of surveillance technologies is embedded in a complex set of individual psychology, institutional behaviors, and policy principles.

We are willing participants in our own surveillance

Since the 1960s, a significant effort has been underway to program computers to “see” the human face—to develop automated systems for identifying faces and distinguishing them from one another—commonly known as Facial Recognition Technology. While computer scientists are developing FRT in order to design more intelligent and interactive machines, businesses and states agencies view the technology as uniquely suited for “smart” surveillance—systems that automate the labor of monitoring in order to increase their efficacy and spread their reach. Tracking this technological pursuit, Our Biometric Future identifies FRT as a prime example of the failed technocratic approach to governance, where new technologies are pursued as shortsighted solutions to complex social problems. Culling news stories, press releases, policy statements, PR kits and other materials, Kelly Gates provides evidence that, instead of providing more security for more people, the pursuit of FRT is being driven by the priorities of corporations, law enforcement and state security agencies, all convinced of the technology’s necessity and unhindered by its complicated and potentially destructive social consequences. By focusing on the politics of developing and deploying these technologies, Our Biometric Future argues not for the inevitability of a particular technological future, but for its profound contingency and contestability.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Since the Revolutionary War, America's military and political leaders have recognized that U.S. national security depends upon the collection of intelligence. Absent information about foreign threats, the thinking went, the country and its citizens stood in great peril. To address this, the Courts and Congress have historically given the President broad leeway to obtain foreign intelligence. But in order to find information about an individual in the United States, the executive branch had to demonstrate that the person was an agent of a foreign power. Today, that barrier no longer exists. The intelligence community now collects massive amounts of data and then looks for potential threats to the United States. As renowned national security law scholar Laura K. Donohue explains in The Future of Foreign Intelligence, global communications systems and digital technologies have changed our lives in countless ways. But they have also contributed to a worrying transformation. Together with statutory alterations instituted in the wake of 9/11, and secret legal interpretations that have only recently become public, new and emerging technologies have radically expanded the amount and type of information that the government collects about U.S. citizens. Traditionally, for national security, the Courts have allowed weaker Fourth Amendment standards for search and seizure than those that mark criminal law. Information that is being collected for foreign intelligence purposes, though, is now being used for criminal prosecution. The expansion in the government's acquisition of private information, and the convergence between national security and criminal law threaten individual liberty. Donohue traces the evolution of U.S. foreign intelligence law and pairs it with the progress of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. She argues that the bulk collection programs instituted by the National Security Agency amount to a general warrant, the prevention of which was the reason the Founders introduced the Fourth Amendment. The expansion of foreign intelligence surveillanceleant momentum by advances in technology, the Global War on Terror, and the emphasis on securing the homelandnow threatens to consume protections essential to privacy, which is a necessary component of a healthy democracy. Donohue offers a road map for reining in the national security state's expansive reach, arguing for a judicial re-evaluation of third party doctrine and statutory reform that will force the executive branch to take privacy seriously, even as Congress provides for the collection of intelligence central to U.S. national security. Alarming and penetrating, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of foreign intelligence and privacy in the United States.

Renowned national security law scholar Laura Donohue traces the evolution of privacy law in the digital age, and pairs that account with a history of the growth of the national security state's intelligence apparatus over the last two decades.