On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at an ATM, visit the mall, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail for government agencies and businesses to access. As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance in American life over the last two centuries-from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies-such as credit cards, website "cookies," and electronic toll collection-that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century. The Soft Cage offers a compelling, vitally important history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives.
Reviews:
"If the government is investigating you, the amount of information about your interests, actions and whereabouts it can gather is staggering. In effect, Parenti notes, routine digital surveillance is everywhere - credit cards, workplace IDs, gym memberships, health insurance records and Internet accounts... Be worried, be very worried."
The New York Times Book Review
"A chillingly inclusive look at the history of surveillance in the United States. From the crude handwritten tracking records of African American slaves in the antebellum South to the uses of early photography to today's insatiable computers, the author shows surveillance starting as a trickle and becoming a stream that has grown into a raging river."
Los Angeles Times
"Parenti has created a series of historical vignettes, from the use of slave passes to control African Americans in the Old South to the rise of fingerprinting to keep track of criminals to the use of identification cards to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. The book, though, is at its best when dealing with the steady encroachments of modern technology on individual privacy. Surveillance cameras monitor us in our schools, workplaces, parks and highways. With ATMs, credit cards, Internet 'cookies,' cell phones, global positioning systems and EZ-Pass, modern Americans leave electronic footprints wherever they go."
The Washington Post Book World
"As Parenti ably describes it, the history of surveillance moves from slaves to immigrants to political radicals to criminals to the poor to workers, and then to anyone with a credit card and a computer…A provocative book that is a must-read for those interested in privacy rights and the present war on terrorism."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Truly spooky."
The Seattle Times
"Combining archival work, modern and postmodern theoretical savvy, and a style of clarity and mounting alarm, Christian Parenti hammers out a warning: the machinery of surveillance has grandiose and universal ambitions. The Soft Cage is a cautionary tale, a history, a handbook, and a hope."
Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged, and co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra
"Christian Parenti has done it again. Lockdown America was the most politically sophisticated and uncompromisingly astute book on the prison-industrial complex. In The Soft Cage we now have a comparable examination of the role of surveillance in shaping and maintaining social hierarchy and class power in American history. This book is well-written and lively, thorough and intelligent, historically grounded and steeped in political economy and social context. It is a must read for anyone serious about progressive political change in this country."
Adolph Reed, Jr., author of Class Notes and W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought
"The Soft Cage is an extremely important and timely book, one that every American concerned with privacy and civil liberties should read. Parenti does a superb job addressing the current threats to our freedoms and puts these issues into a much needed historical context."
Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, professor, New York Law School
"The bad news is that a surveillance society of Orwellian menace is already here. The good news is that Christian Parenti has written a brilliant field guide to understanding and subverting it."
Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities and City of Quartz
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Kirkus Review:
Forget about the right of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. So writes activist scholar Parenti (Lockdown America, not reviewed) in this informative account of governmental and corporate surveillance in America. Government spying on its citizenry is nothing new, the author explains, deftly sketching the evolution of surveillance from slave passes to mug books to tracking devices worn by parolees. But its steady growth, the sophistication of its sources and tactics, the infection of overt surveillance by strategies from covert operations, is perhaps a good deal greater than the reader might realize. While the author deploys Foucault and Althusser to help us understand the culture of obedience, the kernel that most readers will find worth gnawing is Justice Brandeis†s plea for "the right to be left alone." Parenti sharply explores the gray area between protection and invasion of privacy, in particular the way in which fear, patriotic vigor, and pop-cultural nonchalance (witness reality TV) can facilitate political and commercial misuse of the data highway. The sheer scope of surveillance, from smart cards to microchip implants, is, in his view, giving rise to an ultra-trusting, super-obedient postmodern subject for whom the issue of privacy is moot: "Underlying this question of obedience is the implicit assumption that state, corporate, and parental powers are infallible." Yet, he points out, political and corporate means serve political and corporate ends, and their price tags can be exorbitant: racism, exploitation, manipulation. There is vulnerability in social anonymity, the author acknowledges, but such items as the USA Patriot Act undermine the notional freedoms that distinguish ademocracy just as much as the freedom of speech. Parenti presents an argument resting on trust of the individual over the expedience of political and cultural criteria that determine insiders and outsiders. He reminds us that privacy protects, as democracy is meant to, the marginalized, the outcast, and the different. Gives you a good stiff shake. |
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