Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual - by Juan D Lindau (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This book investigates the impact of the spread of digital technologies and practices, especially mass surveillance, on privacy and personhood. Lindau argues that the quest for prediction, certainty, and control at the heart of the state's security apparatus destroys an essential component of human dignity and fundamentally undermines liberalism.

Review Quotes

'Digital technologies, ' Juan Lindau convincingly writes, 'turn people inside out, making their inner selves increasingly legible while erasing...their right to be let alone, undisturbed, and unrecognized.' If you want to understand why and how that is happening--and why it's so hard to do anything about it--this deeply-researched book is the place to start.

Professor Lindau's Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual is a welcome addition to the technology and surveillance literature. Rich with both theory and applications the book provides a timely analysis and critique of corporate and state surveillance. Clearly the result of much scholarly labor, the product is a rare synthesis of political, legal, and ethical theory that will be of enduring interest to scholars and practitioners alike.

About the Author

Juan D. Lindau is professor of Political Science at Colorado College. He primarily teaches courses on Comparative Politics and Latin American Politics and actively participates, outside the department, in the History/Political Science major and the International Political Economy major. His primary scholarly interests are the drug war, migration, and the impact of the internet and digital technology on politics. He has written articles and essays for Political Science Quarterly and for Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Foro Internacional, and for the International Political Science Review as well as for a number of edited collections.

He is the author of La elite gobernante mexicana (Mexico D.F.: Joaquin Mortiz, 1993) and co-editor, with Timothy Cheek, of Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). In addition, with Curtis Cook, he edited Aboriginal Right and Self-Government: The Canadian Experience in North American Perspective (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000).

He has received the Lloyd E. Worner Teacher of the Year award and the A.E. and Ethel Irene Carlton Professorship.