Blown To Bits

Excerpts

Preface

Chapter 1: Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?

The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else … The Koans of Bits … Good and Ill, Promise and Peril

Chapter 2: Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned

1984 Is Here, and We Like It … Footprints and Fingerprints … Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away … Little Brother Is Watching … Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S. … Technology Change and Lifestyle Change … Beyond Privacy

Chapter 3: Ghosts in the Machine: Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents

What You See Is Not What the Computer Knows … Representation, Reality, and Illusion … Hiding Information in Images … The Scary Secrets of Old Disks

Chapter 4: Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar

Found After Seventy Years … The Library and the Bazaar … The Fall of Hierarchy … It Matters How It Works … Who Pays, and for What? … Search Is Power … You Searched for WHAT? Tracking Searches … Regulating or Replacing the Brokers

Chapter 5: Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable

Encryption in the Hands of Terrorists, and Everyone Else … Historical Cryptography … Lessons for the Internet Age … Secrecy Changes Forever … Cryptography for Everyone … Cryptography Unsettled

Chapter 6: Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits?

Automated Crimes—Automated Justice … NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime … The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval … Sharing Goes Decentralized … Authorized Use Only … Forbidden Technology … Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance … The Limits of Property

Chapter 7: You Can’t Say That on the Internet: Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression

Do You Know Where Your Child Is on the Web Tonight? … Metaphors for Something Unlike Anything Else … Publisher or Distributor? … Neither Liberty nor Security … The Nastiest Place on Earth … The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech … Protecting Good Samaritans—and a Few Bad Ones … Laws of Unintended Consequences … Can the Internet Be Like a Magazine Store? … Let Your Fingers Do the Stalking … Like an Annoying Telephone Call? … Digital Protection, Digital Censorship—and Self-Censorship

Chapter 8: Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech

Censoring the President … How Broadcasting Became Regulated … The Path to Spectrum Deregulation … What Does the Future Hold for Radio?

Edits and Errata