Alan F. Westin

Social and Political Dimensions of Privacy

This article provides a framework for analyzing privacy in modern societies, defining information privacy and describing three levels that structure the values assigned to privacy. After describing a contemporary privacy baseline (1945-1960), these concepts are applied to social and political privacy developments in three contemporary eras of steadily growing privacy concerns and societal responses across citizen-government, employee-employer, and consumer-business relationships in 1961-1979, 1980-1989, and 1990-2002. Each period is described in terms of new technology applications, changing social climates, and organizational and legal developments. Effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on privacy balances are analyzed and predictions for future privacy developments are presented. The relationship of articles in this issue to the authors framework is noted throughout.

Special report: legal safeguards to insure privacy in a computer society

From the earliest days of the American Republic, our legal and political system has been devoted to placing limits on the powers of surveillance that authorities can conduct over the lives of individuals and private groups. This tradition of limiting surveillance goes back to a stream of development in Western history t h a t begins at least as early as the democratic Greek city-state and represented one of the keystones of the American Constitution.

Computers and the Public's Right of Access to Government Information

Publisher Summary In the first 15 years of large-scale computerization, substantial attention has been paid to the impact of computerization on individual privacy, organizational decision-making, citizen participation in group and political life, and changing power relationships in organizational structures. Yet only in the past few years have we begun to recognize an impact of information technology equally vital to democratic societies: the effects of computer use on the publics right of access to government information. Clearly, an increasing proportion of the information that government agencies store about people, property, and transactions is today going into automated files. So many files of the executive branches of local, state, regional, and national government in the United States have been computerized that our governments client services, administrative operations, program evaluation, and management planning are now permanently embedded in computer and communication systems. Such heavy reliance on computers raises important issues in terms of government secrecy. This chapter discusses the issues of the pre-computer setting of government secrecy, and general patterns of computer usage and its organizational impact on the government. Furthermore the chapter discusses the computer impact on public access: reports from the information-holders and information-seekers, with a look at reports from the federal information-holders, and reports from the information-seekers, an analysis of the access situation, and recommendations for action.