Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare introduces a paper by Joel Brenner that sounds like an article to add to my must-read list:
The War on Law Reviews continues on many fronts: land, sea, air, and particularly in the cyber domain, where today I am pleased to offer the next paper in the Lawfare Research Paper Series: Joel Brenner’s “Mr. Wemmick’s Condition; Or, Privacy as a Disposition, Complete with Skeptical Observations Regarding Various Regulatory Enthusiasms.”
Brenner is already well known to Lawfare readers, so I won’t spend a lot of space introducing him. In addition to serving as the inspector general of NSA and as the national counterintelligence executive, he is the author of America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare
, which is one of the best books on cybersecurity I have read. He is a frequent contributor to Lawfare.
His paper offers a cultural history of privacy and its development in our political and social expectations. It is not a commentary on the current NSA disputes but, in some ways, on the tectonic plates that lie beneath them. It is a look at where our privacy values come from and how they developed. It’s a great read and deeply thought provoking.