Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet

This acclaimed book explores the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug between Americans' yearning for privacy and their insatiable curiosity. The book describes Puritan monitoring in Colonial New England, then shows how the attitudes of the founders placed the concept of privacy in the Constitution. This panoramic view continues with the coming of tabloid journalism in the Nineteenth Century, and the reaction to it in the form of a new right - the right to privacy. The book includes histories of wiretapping, of credit reporting, of sexual practices, of Social Security numbers and ID cards, of modern principles of privacy protection, and of the coming of the Internet and the new challenges to personal privacy it has brought.

"Robert Ellis Smith's expose of privacy invasion will be one of the sleeper best-selling books..." wrote columnist William Safire in The New York Times, December 1999. "His numerous books are required reading for anyone concerned about the ongoing threats," said Simson Garfinkel in Database Nation, 2000.

Here's a chapter-by-chapter description: "Watchfulness" describes church monitoring in the Colonial period. "Serenity" shows the craving for solitude by our founders, which shaped the rights they enshrined in the Constitution. "Mistrust" recounts early battles over confidentiality in the Post Office, the Census, and Western Union. "Space" describes the quest for privacy in living arrangements (including the first moves to suburbia after the Civil War) and the lack of privacy on Southern plantations. "Curiosity" traces the epic development of sensational journalism in the Nineteenth Century. "Brandeis" chronicles how Louis Brandeis reacted to gossip journalism and other new technology by "inventing" a legal right to privacy. "Wiretaps" is the story of electronic surveillance from the invention of the telephone to the 1970s.

"Sex" traces changing attitudes towards sexual privacy over two centuries, and provides a chronicle of a Clintonesque sex scandal that changed attitudes forever after the 1880s. "Torts" describes court battles that eventually provided great latitude for gossip journalism. "The Constitution" is a remarkable new look at the very narrow decisions of the Supreme Court that shaped the very narrow Constitutional protections for privacy in the Twenty-First Century.

"Numbers" tells for the first time where Social Security numbers came from and how they are used now, and describes subtle political efforts to create a universal identity number in the U.S. "Databanks" provides histories of credit reporting, database marketing, and government record-keeping from the 1950s to the present. "Cyberspace" is a look back at the overnight development of the World Wide Web and its impact on personal privacy.

Lastly, the epilogue entitled "Ben Franklin's Web Site" offers specific tips for protecting your privacy. It is modern guidance that Ben Franklin himself would have provided on his Web site.

Robert Ellis Smith has edited and published the monthly newsletter PRIVACY JOURNAL since 1974. A journalist and an attorney, Smith has long been recognized as an advocate for more privacy protection.

He has testified frequently before Congressional committees, regulatory bodies, and state legislative bodies and has appeared on the major network television programs. A graduate of Harvard College, he began his career as a news reporter for daily newspapers including the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. After that, he was assistant director of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center.

Twice he has been asked to write the definition of privacy for The World Book Encyclopedia.

Smith's first book, "Privacy: How to Protect What's Left of It," was nominated for an American Book Award in 1980. Since then he has written "Workrights," "Our Vanishing Privacy,' and a series of privacy reference books including "Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws." These titles are available at amazon.com.

He is a frequent expert witness in court cases and legislative hearings involving individual privacy. Smith has been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, a member of the Human Rights Commission in the District of Columbia, and vice chair of the Coastal Resources Management Council in Rhode Island. Privacy Journal was established in Washington, D.C., and is now based in Providence, Rhode Island.