Unauthorized Access ─ The Crisis in Online Privacy and Security

Going beyond current books on privacy and security, Unauthorized Access: The Crisis in Online Privacy and Security proposes specific solutions to public policy issues pertaining to online privacy and security. Requiring no technical or legal expertise, the book explains complicated concepts in clear, straightforward language.

The authors—two renowned experts on computer security and law—explore the well-established connection between social norms, privacy, security, and technological structure. This approach is the key to understanding information security and informational privacy, providing a practical framework to address ethical and legal issues. The authors also discuss how rapid technological developments have created novel situations that lack relevant norms and present ways to develop these norms for protecting informational privacy and ensuring sufficient information security.

Bridging the gap among computer scientists, economists, lawyers, and public policy makers, this book provides technically and legally sound public policy guidance about online privacy and security. It emphasizes the need to make trade-offs among the complex concerns that arise in the context of online privacy and security.

Robert H. Sloan is a professor and head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published extensively in the areas of computer security, theoretical computer science, and artificial intelligence. He received a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Richard Warner is a professor and Norman and Edna Freehling scholar at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he is the faculty director of the Center for Law and Computers. He is the director of the School of American Law, which has branches in Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia; editor-in-chief of Emerging Markets: A Review of Business and Legal Issues; and a member of the US Secret Service’s Electronic and Financial Crimes Taskforce. He received a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a JD from the University of Southern California. His research interests include privacy, security, contracts, and the nature of values and their relation to action.