The Hidden History of Big Brother in America

This book deals with two very large and often amorphous concepts: privacy and surveillance in the context of both government and the marketplace. Both concepts have undergone changes over the millennia of recorded human history, and those changes have dramatically sped up and expanded over the past few centuries, starting with the widespread use of the printing press in the mid- to late-15th century when books and newspapers began to proliferate across Europe and the rest of the ''civilized'' world by the end of the 17th century. The development of radio, television and the internet in the 20th century heightened the need to define more clearly what both concepts meant and how they applied both to governments (the ''public sector'') and individual and corporate players (the ''private sector'')...