Foucault In Cyberspace:
Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors

James Boyle 1997

Abstract:

This is an essay about law in cyberspace, and in particular about
the way that the state can use privatized enforcement and state-backed
technologies to evade some of the practical (and constitutional) restraints
that had widely been supposed to limit the exercise of legal power over the
Net. Some of my illustrations will come from the current Administration
proposals for Internet copyright regulation, others from the Communications
Decency Act and the cryptography debate. In the process, I make
opportunistic and unsystematic use of the late Michel Foucault's work to
expose some the jurisprudential assumptions that undergird political
orthodoxy on the Net.