David Brin's Transparent Society Revisited

"Early in June 2013, a major news story was the revelation of a government program called PRISM, which taps into electronic communications in an effort to identify and disrupt threats to America. The controversy over this discovery sent me reaching to my bookshelf for David Brin's 1998 work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?1 Re-reading it made me realize that Brin articulated more than just an unusual approach for addressing the issue of surveillance technology. He offers a perspective on the relationship of citizens and the state which challenges conventional libertarian thinking."