Frederick Lane

Author, journalist and contemporary technology expert

From social networking and government surveillance to sexting and cyberporn, attorney, author, and technology expert Frederick Lane takes a hard look at the rapidly evolving world of computers, privacy and free speech.

Lane lectures about emerging technology and its impact on law, society, and culture. His most popular topics include the threats to privacy in an online world, student use and misuse of technology, the shrinking sphere of personal privacy in the workplace, the rise of new surveillance tools (including GPS and RFID chips), the application of copyright law to electronic materials, and how the Internet presents yet another frontier for claims of harassment and discrimination. A partial list of his recent topics is available to the right.

Lane is the author of five books. The most recent, "American Privacy: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Our Most Contested Right," is a biography of the right to privacy that will be available from Beacon Press in early November, 2009. In 2008, Lane published “The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right’s Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court” (Beacon Press), which traces the political efforts of social and religious conservatives to shift the Supreme Court to the right over the last three decades, and its effect on the Court’s handling of church and state issues.

His third book, “The Decency Wars: the Campaign to Cleanse American Culture,” was published by Prometheus Books in 2006. It looks at the efforts of social and religious conservatives to use government policy to impose a particular moral vision on the nation. The Decency Wars covers a variety of contemporary and cultural disputes, including battles over decency and obscenity, censorship, morality, and the role of mass media in our society.

In 2003, Lane published "The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy" (Amacom), which examined the ways in which employers are using a growing number of tools to track the activities of their employees both at work and at home. The Naked Employee discusses a wide range of technologies -- everything from computer software to GPS devices to biometric tools -- and examines what privacy rights, if any, employees can expect at work.

Lane's first book, "Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age"  (Routledge 2000), was a groundbreaking look at how the adult entertainment industry had successfully figured out how to use the Internet to generate enormous profits. The book explores the economic forces that made the adult industry so successfully, and looks at the difficult legal and social implications of that success, including changing American morality, promoting efforts to limit free speech online, and easing the creation and distribution of obscene content, including child pornography.

Over the last decade, Lane has lectured to dozens of universities, colleges, and professional organizations around the country on topics arising out his work. He has been a frequent guest on national television programs (including most notably "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in August 2006), and has been a guest on dozens of different radio stations around the country. In addition to his writing, Lane is a computer forensics expert and frequently provides consultation and expert witness services in civil and criminal cases. A graduate of Amherst College Boston College Law School, he clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Freedman, Chief Judge of the United States District Courts for the District of Massachusetts, from 1988-1990. He lives in Burlington, Vermont with his family and currently serves as Chair of the Burlington School Board.