CURIOSITY, CONFIDENTIALITY AND COMPUTERS.

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 [phone] 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 understanding--that the greatest danger lurks," Brandeis wrote in 1928.

The Brandeis discussion fits neatly in the middle of revelations about the perpetually curious pilgrims and modern struggles to protect information privacy.

Citizens in colonial times thought little of sharing a bed with a stranger or having a letter opened and read by the deliverer. Today, we are advised by Smith to list a directory phone number without an address and regard e-mail as

if it were a postcard.

Colonists developed clever ways (such as writing in code) to get some modicum of privacy. But Ben Franklin's theory of privacy, "three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead," reflects a lack of trust in his contemporaries and their chronic curiosity. Franklin is a central figure in the drama of privacy development because he was "America's first celebrity irritated by the attention he generated in public," says Smith.

The book includes other interesting discussions about Social Security numbers and technological implications for privacy of personal information contained in numerous databases too easily accessible. At the end of each chapter Smith provides "Links," a handy list of related topics to be found in other sections of the book. He also offers "specific advice for protecting your privacy, much as Ben Franklin would have done if he had lived in the era of the World Wide Web."

The pursuit of confidentiality has been Robert Ellis Smith's fervent mission. Ben Franklin's Web Site is an amusing and informative look at the history of privacy in America that also serves as a manual to interpret and address the modern perils to personal privacy.