Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual: Power and Privacy in the Digital Age

Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual is an investigation into the impact of the spread of digital technologies and practices, and especially the wide-spread practice of mass surveillance, on privacy and personhood. The book argues that the quest for prediction, certainty, and control lying at the heart of the state?s security apparatus destroys an essential component of human dignity and fundamentally undermines liberalism.
The book begins with a discussion of the rise of the digital age and the historical import of this development. Subsequent chapters of the book examine different cultural understandings of privacy, the philosophical discussion of its centrality to human existence, and the form and extent of its legal protection. Lindau explores the reasons behind the rise of mass state surveillance, the modest legal restraints governing its use, and its deployment against activists, protestors, and dissidents and its impact on individuals and on privacy. The book then turns to a discussion of the ris