CURIOSITY, CONFIDENTIALITY AND COMPUTERS.

• Author: Thaemert, Rita
• Position: Review

Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet by Robert Ellis Smith, Privacy Journal, Providence, Rhode Island, 2000. 407 pages, softcover, $24. To order from NCSL call (303) 830-2054 and ask for item number 03408.

History buffs will appreciate the privacy anecdotes from James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to Virginia Wolf and Sandra Day O'Connor in this intriguing volume on the evolution of privacy rights by Robert Ellis Smith.

Get the real scoop on Henry Ward Beecher and his 1870s scandal. And read how New York in 1903 became the first of a dozen states to legislate the right to sue for invasion of privacy.

Trivia buffs will appreciate the obscure details about eavesdropping, the national census, the British connection to sensational journalism and accounts of wiretapping using the bug.

Legal buffs will be interested in the numerous court cases used as examples and the chapter on torts. From the 1880s into the 1930s, "virtually all courts around the country came to accept the notion of a tort cause of action based on invasion of privacy," Smith writes.

The fascinating facts get even more intriguing as Smith divulges behind-the-scenes developments that involve the FBI, Richard Nixon and his administration, Justice William Rehnquist, and the evolution of credit bureaus and consumer investigating firms. Smith asks, "Is there something about capitalism that requires poking into the business of others, that requires regulating behavior?"

The high point of Smith's presentation of the evolution of privacy in the United States is the chapter on Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Sensational news stories and new technology at the end of the 19th century spurred two Boston lawyers, Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren Jr., to devise a privacy remedy, "the right to be let alone."

"The makers of the Constitution appreciated that to civilized man, the most valuable of rights is the right to be let alone. ... It is in the insidious encroachments by the well-meaning--by those of zeal without...