Fiction Books
Barry Eisler, The God’s Eye View
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Ken MacLeod, Intrusion
George Orwell, 1984
Philip K. Dick, Minority Report
Non-fiction Books
Why Privacy Matters and Misconceptions about Privacy
Heidi Boghosian, I Have Nothing to Hide and 20 other Myths about Surveillance and Privacy
Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters
Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security
Carissa Véliz, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data
The Current Digital Reality
Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion and Future of Policing
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains
Laura Dodsworth & Patrick Fagan, Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and how to Resist it
John Fasman, We See it All: Liberty and Justice in the Age of Perpetual Surveillance
Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You
Laurent Richard & Sandrine Riguad, Pegasus: How a Spy in your Pocket threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy
Bruce Schneier, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and how to Bend them Back
Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
The USA’s Surveillance Regime and the 5 Eyes Intelligence Network
Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide
Richard Kerbaj, The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network
Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record
Cybersecurity and Technological Vulnerability
Bruce Schneier, Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
Daniel J. Solove & Woodrow Hartzog, Breached: Why Data Security Laws Fail and how to Improve it
Digital Authoritarianism Outside the ‘West’
Geoffrey Cain, The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest Launch a New Era of Social Control
Jonathan E. Hillman, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future
Marc Owen Jones, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media
Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State
Ian Williams, Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny
Academic Articles (a Selection of my Favorites)
General Privacy and Surveillance Society
Tiberiu Dragu & Yonatan Lupu, Digital authoritarianism and the future of human rights, International Organization, 75.4 (2021): 991–1017.
Daniel J. Solove, Conceptualizing privacy, California Law Review, 90 (2002): 1087.
Daniel J. Solove, The Myth of the Privacy Paradox, SSRN Electronic Journal (2020).
Shoshana Zuboff, Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization, Journal of Information Technology, 30.1 (2015): 75–89.
Microtargeting and Public Manipulation
Colin J. Bennett & David Lyon, Data-driven elections: implications and challenges for democratic societies, Internet Policy Review, 8.4 (2019).
Edward L. Bernays, The engineering of consent, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 250.1 (1947): 113–120.
W. A. Gorton, Manipulating Citizens: How Political Campaigns’ Use of Behavioral Social Science Harms Democracy, New Political Science, 38(1) (2016): 61–80.
Zeynep Tufekci, Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics, First Monday (2014).
F. J. Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., Online Political Microtargeting: Promises and Threats for Democracy, Utrecht Law Review, 14(1) (2018): 82–96.
The Global Push for Client Side Scanning (Spyware) and Lawful Access (Breaking Encryption)
Harold Abelson et al., Bugs in our pockets: The risks of client-side scanning, Journal of Cybersecurity, 10.1 (2024).
Harold Abelson et al., Keys under doormats, Communications of the ACM, 58.10 (2015): 24–26.
Ross Anderson, Chat control or child protection?, arXiv preprint (2022).
Eloise C. Hewson & Peter S. Harrison, Talking in the dark: Rules to facilitate open debate about lawful access to strongly encrypted information, Computer Law & Security Review, 40 (2021): 105526.
Seny Kamara et al., Outside looking in: Approaches to content moderation in end-to-end encrypted systems, arXiv preprint (2022).
Kaspar Rosager Ludvigsen, Shishir Nagaraja & Angela Daly, YASM (Yet Another Surveillance Mechanism), arXiv preprint (2022).
Eric Manpearl, Preventing Going Dark: A Sober Analysis and Reasonable Solution to Preserve Security in the Encryption Debate, U. Fla. Journal of Law & Public Policy, 28 (2017): 65.
Jonathan Mayer, Content moderation for end-to-end encrypted messaging, Princeton University, (2019).
O. L. van Daalen, The right to encryption: Privacy as preventing unlawful access, Computer Law & Security Review, 49 (2023): 105804.