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WISdom Proposal Bibliography

Privacy And Security

Database Nation : The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century by Simson Garfinkel, Deborah Russell

    Garfinkel's thoroughly researched and example-rich text explores the history of identification procedures; the computerization of ID systems; how and where data is collected, tracked, and stored; and the laws that protect privacy. He also explains who owns, manipulates, ensures the safety of, and manages the vast amount of data that makes up our collective human infrastructure. The big surprise here? It's not the United States government who controls or manages the majority of this data but rather faceless corporations who trade your purchasing habits, social security numbers, and other personal information just like any other hot commodity.

    There's a heck of a lot of data to digest about data here and only a smidgen of humor to counterbalance the weight of Garfinkel's projections. But then again, humor isn't really appropriate in connection with stolen identities; medical, bank, and insurance record exploitation; or the potential for a future that's a "video surveillance free-for-all."

Privacy in the Information Age by Fred H. Cate, Michael H. Armacost

    Consider this: data routinely collected about you includes your health, credit, marital, educational, and employment histories; the times and telephone numbers of every call you make and receive; the magazines you subscribe to and the books your borrow from the library; your cash withdrawals; your purchases by credit card or check; your electronic mail and telephone messages; where you go on the World Wide Web. The ramifications of such a readily accessible storehouse of information are astonishing.

    Governments have responded to these new challenges to personal privacy in a wide variety of ways. At one extreme, the European Union in 1995 enacted sweeping regulation to protect personal information; at the other extreme, privacy law in the United States and many other countries is fragmented, inconsistent, and offers little protection for privacy on the internet and other electronic networks.

Outsourcing Big Brother: Office of Total Information Awareness Relies on Private Sector to Track Americans By Adam Mayle and Alex Knott

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2002 -- The Total Information Awareness System, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on Americans, has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort. Since 1997, those companies have won contracts from the Defense Department agency that oversees the program worth $88 million, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

Computers Will Say What We Are by Nat Hentoff

December 6th, 2002 4:30 PM - How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. —George Orwell, 1984

Technology and Privacy by Philip E. Agre (Editor), Marc Rotenberg (Editor)

    This series of 10 scholarly essays lays a foundation for understanding the current state of technology-based privacy issues. The diverse group of contributors encompasses the fields of communications, human-computer interaction, law, political science, and sociology. Each contributor provides a capsule view of a privacy concern from a standpoint of where things now stand and what bodes for the future.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David BrinBrin makes a good point here

    Brin argues that we can choose to make this scenario a setting for even greater freedom. The determining factor is whether the power of observation and surveillance is held only by the police and the powerful or is shared by us all. In the latter case, Brin argues that people will have nothing to fear from the watchers because everyone will be watching each other. The cameras would become a public resource to assure that no mugger is hiding around the corner, our children are playing safely in the park, and police will not abuse their power.

The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality by Reg Whitaker, Reginald Whitaker

    Today, Whitaker notes, private-information brokers amass databases for an innumerable variety of commercial purposes--from credit reporting to mass marketing. Vast amounts of detailed personal information, including seemingly useless minutiae, end up in corporate hands. Orwell's monolithic Big Brother has fragmented into a myriad of Little Brothers, which add up to a powerful system with little or no accountability. Who, Whitaker asks, watches the watchers?

The Right to Privacy by Ellen Alderman, Caroline Kennedy (Contributor)

    In what amounts to mandatory reading for all citizens who consider themselves politically aware, Alderman and Kennedy's manual offers "an understanding of the legal right to privacy" by reviewing model cases. Their analysis is divided into sections corresponding to major areas of encroachments against privacy, including those in the workplace, in the press, and, "perhaps the scariest threat to privacy," by way of the computer. An important point underscores the examination: personal privacy is being assaulted to a greater degree than the authors had suspected at the outset of their study. Caroline Kennedy's name may be the initial calling card for some readers, but the significance of the book and its accessibility trump any celebrity aspect. All public libraries should consider purchasing. Brad Hooper

Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet by Robert Ellis Smith, Sangram Majumdar (Illustrator)

    This new book explores the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug between Americans' yearning for privacy and their insatiable curiosity. The book describes Puritan monitoring in Colonial New England, then shows how the attitudes of the founders placed the concept of privacy in the Constitution. This panoramic view continues with the coming of tabloid journalism in the Nineteenth Century, and the reaction to it in the form of a new right - the right to privacy. The book includes histories of wiretapping, of credit reporting, of sexual practices, of Social Security numbers and ID cards, of modern principles of privacy protection, and of the coming of the Internet and the new challenges to personal privacy it brings.

Who Owns Information?: From Privacy to Public Access by Anne Wells Branscomb

    "Can we be altogether happy knowing that groups with whom we have never had any personal, professional, or economic relationship can buy, sell, or trade lengthy and detailed public records that provide the purchaser with almost instant access to everything about us, from our daily travel patterns to our medical profiles, to our financial records?" Branscomb points out how this "unhappy" situation has evolved. She shows how supposedly private information can be accessed and networked to create vast public records. Personal choices, from video selections to religious practices, instantly become part of a public dossier.

Business Management
Will and Vision by Gerard J. Tellis, Peter N. Golder, Clayton M. Christensen

    Empirical analysis, and intelligent commentary.  Among other things, they found that, not only does being first not guarantee anything, but that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all too often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products.

    Rare research-based insight shows that winners will be those executives that can understand when and how to apply the power of vision and will. A must-read for strategists who want to achieve enduring market leadership."­­David Aaker, Vice-Chairman, Prophet Brand Strategy, and author, Managing Brand Equity and Building Strong Brands

20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World by Hugh Courtney

    "If you want to make better strategy choices under uncertainty, then you have to understand the uncertainty you are facing. .... you must embrace uncertainty, ... get to know it." This is the basic thesis of the book, which suggests that...

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James C. Collins, Jerry I. Porras (Contributor)

    The authors found the there were at least twelve commonly held businesses beliefs that their research refuted. In essence these dearly held business beliefs were myths.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins

    The three have joined forces here to set a blueprint for sustainable development. The authors argue that it is possible for companies to reduce energy and materials consumption by up to 90 percent but still increase profits, production, and employment. They outline the four strategies that underlie "natural capitalism" ...

Open-Book Management: The Coming Business Revolution by John Case

    Frequently, effective ownership has been limited to relatively few people. In privately-held companies, usually to a single person and/or to a family. Presumably Case agrees with Al Ehrbar (author of EVA) that the traditional concept of "ownership" must be re-defined so that everyone involved in a given enterprise assumes personal responsibility for adding value.

Media and Culture
The Media Monopoly: With a New Preface on the Internet and Telecommunications Cartels by Ben H. BagdikianBrin makes a good point here

    In his book, The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian writes about the increasing centralization of the media by a small number of private organizations. He explains the concept, causes and consequences of the monopoly in the mass media. To begin with, the author points out that only twenty-three corporations own eighty percent of American media (p. 21). They invest millions in different types of media for primarily two reasons: "money and influence" (p. 5). The power of these conglomerations is such that they can strongly influence the political and social views of the people, mainly through corruption and subtle persuasion techniques.

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Series) by Noam Chomsky

"Propaganda," says Noam Chomsky, "is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state"--in other words, the means by which leaders keep the masses in line. In this slim pamphlet, he looks at American propaganda efforts, from the warmongering of Woodrow Wilson to the creation of popular support for the 1991 military intervention in Kuwait, and reveals how falsification of history, suppression of information, and the promotion of vapid, empty concepts have become standard operating procedure for the leaders of the United States--both Democrats and Republicans--in their efforts to prevent citizens from raising awkward questions about U.S. policy.

Brin makes a good point hereThe Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan Brin makes a good point here

 Bakan, an internationally recognized legal scholar and professor of law at the University of British Columbia, takes a powerful stab at the most influential institution of our time, the corporation. As a legal entity, a corporation has as its edict one and only one goal, to create profits for its shareholders, without legal or moral obligation to the welfare of workers, the environment, or the well-being of society as a whole. Corporations have successfully hijacked governments, promoting free-market solutions to virtually all of the concerns of human endeavor. Competition and self-interest dominate, and other aspects of human nature, such as creativity, empathy, and the ability to live in harmony with the earth, are suppressed and even ridiculed. Bakan believes that, like Communism, this ideological order cannot last and that corporate rule must be challenged to bring balance and revive the values of democracy, social justice, equality, and compassion. This eye-opening look at a system "programmed to exploit others for profit" has been made into a provocative film documentary that could be the next Bowling for Columbine. David Siegfried

Don't miss the movie, scheduled to come to American theaters in June, 2004.

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff

From Publishers Weekly

This husband-and-wife team Zuboff's a Harvard professor and author of In the Age of the Smart Machine, and Maxmin's the former CEO of Volvo and Laura Ashley give socialist utopians of yesteryear stiff competition with their manifesto for a more personalized capitalism. They strive for the pop socioeconomics of a David Brooks or a Malcolm Gladwell, but their heavy academic style may disenchant some readers before their thesis's more radical parts kick in. Over the last two centuries, they argue, an increasingly efficient economy, coupled with a rise in democratic thinking and growing access to information, has opened up life's possibilities to increasing numbers of people. Because participation in the consumption-based economy is unavoidable, the general public looks to markets to provide "deep support" in their quest for individualization, but "are routinely punished for being complex psychological individuals in a world still fitted out for the old mass order." This macroeconomic structure treats people as either employees or consumers and inevitably hurts their feelings. Zuboff and Maxmin would eliminate the "little murders" of customer service interaction by replacing the current transaction-based model with a form of "distributed capitalism" based on a customer-supplier relationship, so semi-anonymous customer service reps will be replaced by "advocates" fully emotionally involved in their clients' needs. It's not clear how society will make its way to the authors' dream of a fully automated lifestyle, or what life will be like for blue-collar workers and manual laborers. Pundits who celebrated the Internet's potential to thoroughly revolutionize the economy, however, will no doubt rally behind these impractical visions.
Shaping the Network Society : The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace
by Douglas Schuler (Editor), Peter Day (Editor)
"This book adds two important concerns to an urgent agenda for research and action in the field of network technologies: How can we raise the profile of social responsibility in a field dominated by business interests? And how can we make this a genuinely international project, rather than one dominated by nation-specific interests?"
--Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, author of *The Global City*
Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, Lewis H. Lapham (Introduction)

    This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium by Paul Levinson

    "Levinson performs a useful service . . . [he] applies McLuhanism to almost every facet of modern communications."

Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World by Joseph Turow

    Combining shrewd analysis of contemporary practices with a historical perspective, Breaking Up America traces the momentous shift that began in the mid-1970s when advertisers rejected mass marketing in favor of more aggressive target marketing. Turow shows how advertisers exploit differences between consumers based on income, age, gender, race, marital status, ethnicity, and lifesyles.

  Turow is too subtle a thinker to believe that advertising is responsible for the differences between people, but he makes a strong case that the way those differences have been used to distinguish different markets for different products has, simply by defining and presenting various subcultures, furthered those differences.

The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know
by Andrew L. Shapiro

    By putting individuals in charge of their own information gathering, Shapiro suggests that we might find ourselves imprisoned within our increasingly narrow choices or "oversteering" into a corporate-controlled Net environment not unlike network television. His aim is to alert us to the problems and help us steer a middle course to fully realize the benefits of worldwide networking.

    This book was the challenge that resulted in The WISdom Proposal

The Internet and Society by James Slevin

    I was glad to find a text that discussed the Internet from a social and cultural perspective. It was so refreshing to find that someone recognizes that the impacts of technology are broader than just the "online culture."

We the Media: A Citizen's Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy by Don Hazen (Introduction), Julie Winokur (Editor)

    A unique collaboration of over one hundred media organizations, critics, and activists, We the Media is filled with up-to-the-minute facts, figures, and commentary on the state of the media today. In irreverent and informative sections on ownership, commercialization, content, and access, the book makes plain the real dangers of increasing media concentration, and highlights efforts throughout the country to combat it.

Communities in Cyberspace by Marc A. Smith (Editor), Peter Kollock (Editor)

    There are four primary issues probed here: the question of online identity in an environment where individuals cannot be seen; the question of social order and control in what is, at least on the surface, a largely anarchic environment; the structure and dynamics of online communities; and the cybercommunity as a foundation for collective action.

The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory : Magic, Metaphor, Power by Andrew Herman (Editor), Thomas Swiss (Editor)

    Brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to explore the Web as a complex nexus of economic, political, social, and aesthetic forces. Although each of the chapters deals with a different aspect of the Web, each of them shares a focal concern with the Web as a unique 'cultural technology.' Softcover; hardcover also available.

Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability by Jennifer Preece

    Beginning with basic concepts of community and online activities, Preece moves on to survey research on the use of virtual spaces, and then focuses on techniques to design and build optimal cybervillages for given needs and people. By using plenty of examples and case studies from actual Web sites and other electronic communities, she sheds light on tools that work to make them sustainable. Whether the current generation of e-planners will heed her words--and whether they can create something livable out of the weird suburb/wilderness hybrid that we have now--will be the key to determining how 21st-century humans live, work, and communicate. --Rob Lightner

The Last Word Here is Cooperative Culture!

Information Organization
Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman, David Sume, Loring Leifer

    The discussion alternates between describing the deeply stressful task of absorbing poorly organized data and exploring solutions that require a bit of rethinking, but that reward such an investment with improved understanding and, maybe, a state change from information to wisdom.

Find it Online: The Complete Guide to Online Research by Alan M. Schlein, J. J. Newby, Peter Weber

   One shouldn't have to study a book in order to find something on the internet, but unortunately we must.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Chris Sherman, Gary Price

    Enormous expanses of the Internet are unreachable with standard Web search engines. This book provides the key to finding these hidden resources by identifying how to uncover and use invisible Web resources. Mapping the invisible Web, when and how to use it, assessing the validity of the information, and the future of Web searching are topics covered in detail.

Law and Intellectual Property Rights
Beyond Our Control? : Confronting the Limits of Our Legal System in the Age of Cyberspace by Stuart Biegel

    This book provides a framework for thinking about the law and cyberspace, examining the extent to which the Internet is currently under control and the extent to which it can or should be controlled.

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig

    "We, the Net People, in order to form a more perfect Transfer Protocol..." might be recited in future fifth-grade history classes, says attorney Lawrence Lessig. He turns the now-traditional view of the Internet as an uncontrollable, organic entity on its head, and explores the architecture and social systems that are changing every day and "taming" the frontier.

See an Overview of Lessig's new book, The Future of Ideas

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity by Siva Vaidhyanathan

    Details the specious ideological evolution of copyright from a set of loose policies intended to encourage cultural expression into a form of property law (now codified in the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000) that functions as a seal on creative works.

Intellectual Property Rights in the Global Economy by Keith E. Maskus, C. Fred Bergsten (Preface)

    Over the past 15 years, intellectual property rights (IPRs) have moved from an arcane area of legal analysis and a policy backwater to the forefront of global economic policymaking. In the 1990s dozens of countries unilaterally strengthened their laws and regulations in this area, and many others are poised to do likewise.

Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet by Jessica Litman

    Central to her exegesis is a critique of the method of drafting legislation, begun just about 100 years ago, that lets the interested parties negotiate among themselves and submit to legislators proposed amendments and revisions. She includes libraries as parties with special interests in this system and notes that the most important group, consumers, is inevitably not represented.

Who Owns Academic Work: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property by Corynne McSherry

    Corynne McSherry explores the propertization of academic work and shows how that process is shaking the foundations of the university, the professoriate, and intellectual property law. The modern university's reason for being is inextricably tied to that of the intellectual property system. The rush of universities and scholars to defend their knowledge as property dangerously undercuts a working covenant that has sustained academic life--and intellectual property law--for a century and a half.

Christian Millennialism
Essays on Premillennialism: A Modern Reaffirmation of an Ancient Doctrine -- by K. Neil Foster (Editor), David E. Fessenden (Editor)

A Case for Premillennialism: A New Consensus by Donald K. Campbell (Editor), et al

Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 by Timothy P. Weber

Miscellaneous
Encyclopedia of the Future by George Thomas Kurian (Editor), Graham T. Molitor
Great Projects by James Tobin

    What is it, James Tobin asks, that has driven Americans to so thoroughly remake their country generation after generation, made them so avid to undertake massive works of public engineering and so capable at that work

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank

    His boisterous reminder that markets are fundamentally not democracies is worth repeating as the level of wealth polarization in America reaches heights not seen since the 1920s.

The function of the WISdom Co-op is to universally and democratically control the market for all consumer goods, services and information, effectively insuring economic democracy!  ~ RJA.


Consumers International

    Offers a wide variety of services and information for e-commerce consumers.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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