Private Eyes Are Watching You
Posted by Donna Levin on July 04, 2010 | READ & ADD COMMENTS BELOWAs Reece Hirsch says, next time you feel like you’re being watched, you probably are.
As a novelist, Reece Hirsch is the author of The Insider, a new legal thriller. As an attorney, Hirsch specializes in privacy issues.
Privacy issues are on everyone’s mind these days. When I first got a Facebook page I merrily keyed in plenty of personal info, including religious and political affiliations. (It was my first social networking site – that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.) Being a San Franciscan, I didn’t think anything of having various liberal causes promoted on the sidebar of my page, but when an ad for “the best kosher restaurant in California” popped up I realized what everyone else seems to have known for a long time. They’re using my information.
An ad on my Facebook page is fairly benign; after all, the site provides a valuable service for free. In fact, Hirsch himself points out, “Some would say that personal privacy protections are eroding. Others, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, would contend that our way of thinking about privacy is simply evolving, that we're enjoying the benefits of being more connected to one another and we're willing to accept an attendant loss of privacy.” I’ll buy that, up to a point. But just where is that point? In recent months, at least two children have been removed from airplanes, or denied boarding, because they had the same name as someone else on the “no fly” list. (In 2004 the late Senator Ted Kennedy was detained at several times at Logan Airport because of a similar problem.
So, will we look back on this first post-9/11 decade and compare it to the McCarthy era, or wish that we’d done more to protect ourselves?
Presumably Will Connelly, the hero of The Insider wishes that. In the first chapter he witnesses a colleague fall to his death in what first appears to be a suicide from the window of the 38th floor. Soon Will, to quote Hirsch, “is the prime suspect in a murder, the target of a S.E.C. insider trading investigation, and a pawn in a complex criminal scheme that involves Russian mafia and a ruthless terrorist plot to release sarin nerve gas on San Francisco’s BART train system.”
Like we need more stress during the commute hour.
You can read the first chapter of *The Insider* on Hirsch’s website, *ReeceHirsch.com* and Reece’s book on his website. He’ll be at Thrillerfest V in New York on July 10th in Manhattan, should you need an excuse to visit the Apple, which of course you don’t. If you already live there, don’t taunt me, okay? And keep an eye out for kosher restaurants.
