Five top books on privacy

Jeffrey Rosen is the president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and a law professor at George Washington University. He is legal affairs editor of The New Republic, and co-editor (with Benjamin Wittes) of Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change.

Prefacing his Washington Post list of five favorite books on privacy, Rosen recommends first reading "the best article on privacy ever written: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s 'The Right to Privacy,' first published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 and available online."

One of Rosen's top books on the right to privacy:

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET AND HOW TO STOP IT by Jonathan Zittrain (2008).

In addition to illuminating how the Internet works, Zittrain explores the transition from what he calls Privacy 1.0, where threats to privacy came mostly from data stored in government and corporate databases, to Privacy 2.0, where the data is generated, recorded and shared by individuals. Zittrain helps illuminate why the government and the private sector can share information so easily, and why the law seems to make that easier, not harder.

Read about the other books on Rosen's list at the Washington Post.

Learn about a couple of Rosen's favorite books on the Supreme Court, and follow him on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue