The Naked Crowd : Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age

Rating:
Summary: Security or Liberty? Both!
Review: The Naked Crowd's title comes from an example author Jeffrey Rosen uses to audiences and classes. He descibes an airport scanner that "undresses" you as you go through it, revealing not only potential weapons, but you in all your nakedness beneath your clothing. Rosen then tells his audiences that technology exists to easily obscure the face and other identifying parts of a person's body on the screen, but still be able, with complete accuracy, to see potential weapons. When given the choice of "the Naked Machine" and "the Blob Machine," there are always people who choose "the Naked Machine."

Rosen examines how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Americans have been willing to give up their liberty, not for security, but for the illusion of security. He explores the proliferation of closed circuit TV cameras throughout Britain, which has been shown to have no effect at all on security. He discusses how the public and politicians alike are looking for a technological "silver bullet" that will solve our security problems. He mentions in passing an article in The Atlantic Monthly, about the dangers of depending on slick technology to solve our security problems. Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear, expands on this theme and offers practical solutions to the problem, and I highly recommend it in addition to The Naked Crowd.

Using examples from history, sociology, psychology, and the law, Rosen shows how we have come to this seemingly un-American state of affairs. The Naked Crowd is really quite readable and thought-provoking in a non-partisan way. He praises both Franklin Roosevelt and Rudolph Giuliani as effective leaders in a crisis, and doesn't mention Bush at all. An especially entertaining and revealing episode has Rosen interviewing Larry Ellison of Oracle in his Atherton, CA mansion.

After a final chapter about the trend of exhibitionism (Jerry Springer, weblogs) that doesn't add to his arguments, Rosen spends the epilogue proposing and discarding possible solutions to the issue of liberty vs. security. He finds that our best bet is probably to count on politicians to balance the two, rather than leave it to judges or technocrats. He doesn't seem entirely satisfied with that answer, either, and leaves unsaid what is likely the real answer, which is to educate ourselves as citizens and stay on top of complex and changing issues and demand that our representatives protect both our lives and our liberty.

Rating:
Summary: Security or Liberty? Both!
Review: The Naked Crowd's title comes from an example author Jeffrey Rosen uses to audiences and classes. He descibes an airport scanner that "undresses" you as you go through it, revealing not only potential weapons, but you in all your nakedness beneath your clothing. Rosen then tells his audiences that technology exists to easily obscure the face and other identifying parts of a person's body on the screen, but still be able, with complete accuracy, to see potential weapons. When given the choice of "the Naked Machine" and "the Blob Machine," there are always people who choose "the Naked Machine."

Rosen examines how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Americans have been willing to give up their liberty, not for security, but for the illusion of security. He explores the proliferation of closed circuit TV cameras throughout Britain, which has been shown to have no effect at all on security. He discusses how the public and politicians alike are looking for a technological "silver bullet" that will solve our security problems. He mentions in passing an article in The Atlantic Monthly, about the dangers of depending on slick technology to solve our security problems. Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear, expands on this theme and offers practical solutions to the problem, and I highly recommend it in addition to The Naked Crowd.

Using examples from history, sociology, psychology, and the law, Rosen shows how we have come to this seemingly un-American state of affairs. The Naked Crowd is really quite readable and thought-provoking in a non-partisan way. He praises both Franklin Roosevelt and Rudolph Giuliani as effective leaders in a crisis, and doesn't mention Bush at all. An especially entertaining and revealing episode has Rosen interviewing Larry Ellison of Oracle in his Atherton, CA mansion.

After a final chapter about the trend of exhibitionism (Jerry Springer, weblogs) that doesn't add to his arguments, Rosen spends the epilogue proposing and discarding possible solutions to the issue of liberty vs. security. He finds that our best bet is probably to count on politicians to balance the two, rather than leave it to judges or technocrats. He doesn't seem entirely satisfied with that answer, either, and leaves unsaid what is likely the real answer, which is to educate ourselves as citizens and stay on top of complex and changing issues and demand that our representatives protect both our lives and our liberty.

Rating:
Summary: A question for our times: Why should you trust me?
Review: The premise of "The Naked Crowd" is that we have become addicted to expensive feel-good gadgetry to protect us from terrorism, but that this gadgetry neither serves the needs of those who want more security nor those who want more privacy.

Rosen finds plenty of examples to bolster his case: the face-recognition systems that can't tell men from women, and suspect databases that force customs officials to pull 5-year old children and 85-year old seniors out of line, and have turned travel into a Kafkaesque nightmare for some unfortunately named individuals.

The more interesting question that the book addresses is why we are drawn to these worthless schemes. Rosen gives the unexpected results of an airport scanner test as the provocation for writing the book. People offered a choice of going through two airport scanners, which were identical in every way - except that only one had the image of the travellers' naked bodies obfuscated from the guards' screen - often chose the "Naked Machine" in preference to the other. The reason they offered was that they were using their voluntary humiliation as proof of their trustworthiness.

Rosen suggests that this need to "expose" ourselves has been caused by our moving from small communities, where we knew everyone, to a hyperspace of constantly changing crowds of strangers. We each develop a mental thumbnail sketch of ourselves that we feel obliged to "market" via weblogs, bulletin boards - and user reviewer bio's. It forces us to concentrate on revealing ourselves, rather than trying to retain whatever privacy we could in townships where everyone knew everyone else's business.

It would have been helpful if Rosen had offered a working definition of "privacy" or an explanation of why we should "protect" it. He pokes good fun at the British, who have mounted video cameras on every available vertical surface in the country in response to three decades of terrorist bombings. He uses this as the prime example of an invasive, but useless, defense system. The cameras haven't resulted in the arrest of a single terrorist: they have simply become a very expensive way of nabbing the occasional car thief.

However, the British don't find the cameras particularly intrusive. They, on their part, are dumbfounded at Americans' willingness to allow employers to read private emails, which they find far more intrusive than a web cam in the parking lot. Whose definition of privacy is "right"? If we can't define "privacy", how can we "protect" it?

As much as has been written on security and privacy recently, I found a great deal new to think about in "The Naked Crowd". It raises issues which are more complicated than simply choosing the level of "privacy" we are prepared to give up for more "security."

Rating:
Summary: Freedom vrs Fear
Review: This is a great book on privacy and the freedom we are willing to give up because of fear (sometimes overrated fear) that the media wants us to believe. The book starts off describing how England has set up CCTV cameras all around London and are using them to prevent small crimes instead of terrorism which it was set up for..

The book talks about the things that we fear... We fear things that are big in casualties but doesn't happen that often. This is like people who fear flying, but drive every day and as most of us know there are more accidents in cars than in planes. Then the book goes into the fact that we are willing to give our freedoms and privacy because we fear terrorism and we think that adding technology and country wide databases will help solve all our problems. We are letting the government turn our country into a police state and the exact same thing our founders left England and started this country to get away from. The book also talks about how we are willing to give up privacy so easily. In old times there was more structure in society we were all classified based on our status or wealth. Because of this we knew who we were dealing with, we knew who we could trust and who we could share things with. In today's society we are sharing things freely over the internet and through email to people we haven't even seen. The book also claims not to have all the answers on how we should prevent terrorism or how or what we should be willing to share, but just wants us to look at the options out there and realize that create a master database with everyone listed in the US is not the answer and has not proven to be effective in stopping terrorism. We need to make sure that if we are going to give up some of our freedom we are going to get tangible and recognizable results. We are going to get the protection we need (if that is even possible) for the freedom we give up. We also need to make sure that the people using the technologies like CCTV and master databases have checks to ensure that these systems are used for the purpose they were created and not for fight small meaningless crimes. This is a great book and I would recommend it to anyone...