The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age - Hardcover

Rosen, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375508007 ISBN 13: 9780375508004

Publisher: Random House, 2004

Synopsis

In The Naked Crowd, acclaimed author Jeffrey Rosen makes an impassioned argument about how to preserve freedom, privacy, and security in a post-9/11 world. How we use emerging technologies, he insists, will be crucial to the preservation of essential American ideals.

In our zeal to catch terrorists and prevent future catastrophic events, we are going too far—largely because of irrational fears—and violating essential American freedoms. That’s the contention at the center of this persuasive new polemic by Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor of The New Republic, which builds on his award-winning book The Unwanted Gaze.

Through wide-ranging reportage and cultural analysis, Rosen argues that it is possible to strike an effective and reasonable balance between liberty and security. Traveling from England to Silicon Valley, he offers a penetrating account of why well-designed laws and technologies have not always been adopted. Drawing on a broad range of sources—from the psychology of fear to the latest Code Orange alerts and airport security technologies—he also explores the reasons that the public, the legislatures, the courts, and technologists have made feel-good choices that give us the illusion of safety without actually making us safer. He describes the dangers of implementing poorly thought out technologies that can make us less free while distracting our attention from responses to terrorism that might work.

Rosen also considers the social and technological reasons that the risk-averse democracies of the West continue to demand ever-increasing levels of personal exposure in a search for an illusory and emotional feeling of security. In Web logs, chat rooms, and reality TV shows, an increasing number of citizens clutter the public sphere with private revelations best kept to themselves. The result is the peculiar ordeal of living in the Naked Crowd, in which few aspects of our lives are immune from public scrutiny. With vivid prose and persuasive analysis, The Naked Crowd is both an urgent warning about the choices we face in responding to legitimate fears of terror and a vision for a better future.

About this title

Review

In The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age Jeffrey Rosen attempts to diagnose the cause of what he sees as deteriorating liberty in the post-9/11 era. At the same time, he sketches some pathways toward a cure: a balance of security and privacy through legislation. The book provides a provocative--if occasionally simplistic--survey of sociological and psychological research regarding crowd behavior in reaction to a fear-inducing tragedy, but it loses its way in a general exploration of public exhibitionism, from blogs to reality TV. While Rosen doesn't argue that America is an Orwellian society, he suggests that, in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans are poised to trade their privacy and liberty for an increased feeling of security. The operative word for him is "feeling": people are, as he says, "more concerned about feeling safe than being safe." The crowd chases seeming high-tech "silver bullets" when it is often cheaper, low-tech, less-showy, and less invasive forms of screening that are most effective. In fact, in his compelling case study of Britain's CCTV he shows there is little evidence that the massive program--which photographs the average Briton with 300 separate security cameras each day--has done anything to reduce crime or terrorism.

In the weakest part of the book, Rosen tries to connect his larger thesis about the need to balance privacy and security to the emergence of reality TV and the exhibitionism of blogs and other technologies. While his argument--that people in the modern era must expose their personal lives to win trust--offers some food for thought, this turns towards the entertainment industry seems misplaced in his march toward public policy. Overall, Rosen takes a melancholy view of the ability to change crowd dynamics in a media-saturated world. In his final chapter, he does hold out some hope, though. In particular, he argues for legislation emphasizing the dangers of discrimination inherent in many security screening technologies and Dataveillance. He hopes that this appeal to anti-discrimination may awaken the slumbering crowd to a looming crisis of unrestrained security technologies. While Rosen makes an interesting case in this thought-provoking book, it will probably take a more strident call for change to shift public opinion in the ways Rosen imagines. --Patrick O'Kelley

About the Author

JEFFREY ROSEN is a law professor at The George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His first book was The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. His essays and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and on National Public Radio. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375508007
• ISBN 13: 9780375508004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272