Reviews
By Michael Fraase
Thursday, 02 September 1999 08:35PM CST
Section: 00 Administrivia
Michael Fraase has written a textbook for the dispossessed. The system has the seeds of fairness planted in it, but you have to know where to spade and hoe. And spade you must. Your privacy and rights of access have been turned into a commodity which does not profit you. Wise up. Read this and begin to speak and act with accurate knowledge. Democracy is not a form of rule which favors the apathetic. Lift that rock in the garden and watch things scurry from the light.
—Robert Hunter (from the Foreword)
Fraase, Michael
INFORMATION ECLIPSE: PRIVACY AND ACCESS IN AMERICA. St. Paul, MN: ARTS & FARCES, 1999. xvi + 328 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN 1-892659-00-X. Bibliography/Index
Michael Fraase’s Information Eclipse: Privacy and Access in America is “a sort of early-warning canary in an informational coal mine” (p. xiii). Unlike Ayn Rand (see Rand, Ayn, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy), Fraase sees as much danger from business as from government, for both agencies deprive individual citizens of privacy and information. Chapter 11, “In Real Life…,” sets forth the precautions Americans can take to protect their privacy and their right to access information without surrendering confidentiality.
QA 76.9 .A25F73 1999
—Business Library Review International Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2000).
It may be hard to imagine a book about an abstract topic such as “information” that reads like a thriller, but that is exactly what this is. Incorporating pertinent anecdotal case histories about major media networks, Microsoft Corporation, Congress, legendary computer hackers, America Online, the Secret Service, and others, this book will do more to orient the lay reader to the “Information Age” in barely 300 pages than would a year of Internet surfing, a weekend intensive with Bill Gates, and an internship at Fox TV combined. And it’s fun too, strangely enough.
The phrase “politics of information” is one we should be hearing a lot in the new millennium—and if we don’t hear it, or understand what it means, we’d better worry. Author Michael Fraase’s thesis is that “the interests of government, corporations, and citizens are simultaneously orbiting each other and producing an information eclipse” which threatens to erode our “information rights” of privacy and access. Fraase begins by defining what information is, examining the different kinds of information which exist, and then moving us through a capsule history of information and information-related laws and rights, into modern issues of censorship, personal privacy, the press, computer cryptography, and more.
In a crisp and lively fashion, Fraase elucidates precisely why we should be concerned—how information and the manner in which it is processed, disseminated, and distilled into “knowledge” (he makes a crucial distinction between information and knowledge) bears profoundly on our lives. Unlike the branches of the U.S. government, there are no constitutional checks and balances on the powers of corporations or on their spheres of influence. In our new information economy, this has more radically far-reaching consequences than ever before. Fraase also suggests ways of being vigilant, and of safeguarding information rights for ourselves and others. After reading this book, you’re likely to feel much better prepared for the new age of the real world.
—Marc Polonsky author of The Poetry Reader’s Toolkit (NTC Contemporary Publishing Group) and college English teacher in Berkeley, Calif. (review published by Fearless Books, April 1999)
The author of the Internet Tour Guide series (Ventana Pres, 1993 - 94) juxtaposes rights to privacy and information access with myths of a free economy and press, and information economy corporations tracking consumers with computer “cookies” and other privacy violating ploys. Includes empowering Web resources.
—Book News (SciTech Book News, May 1999)
Our freedom of speech, access to information, and personal privacy rights are coming under siege while citizens remain hard pressed for time to follow and participate in the national dialogue about these crucial matters. A master at unmasking the complex and having a bit of fun in the process, author Michael Fraase now brings these issues to the rest of us as he demonstrates that policy makers, knowledge workers, and everyday citizens hall have a “need to know”. Information Eclipse is a concise, easy-to-read, informative work that brings the non-specialist general reader completely up-to-date on contemporary concerns regarding personal privacy, access to information, and First Amendment issues in our computer dominated age.
—Andrew Bell, Reviewer; Midwest Book Review Oct 1998
Don’t ask why, just buy this book so the author can afford to publish EGR. Then when it goes platinum, you can tell your friends you read it first on the net for free!
—Chris Locke, Entropy Gradient Reversals Oct 7, 1998
* * * * (of 5 stars; Very Good) Your guide to avoiding anxiety, protecting your turf in the Microsoft-Dominated, Who-Says-There’s-a-Free-Press, How-Come-Everybody-Seems-to-Know-About-Your-Appendectomy, Coming Information Age.
—Lex Ticonderoga; Today’s Books/Public News Service Oct 26, 1998