BernardKeenan, Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2025, 275pp, pb, US$45.00, C$65.00

This is a fascinating, innovative, though at times irritating work.It is the only book written by a lawyer to appear in a series, currently featuring 15 titles, called History and Foundation of Information Sciences, and the publisher places it in the category of Political Science.Yet Dr Keenan, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Laws at UCL, displays an admirable grasp of current and extremely complex legal provisions and their historical antecedents.At the outset the reader is put on notice that 'Rather than relaying a linear history of the law, this book adopts a media theoretical genealogical methodology' (3).The appearance of 'genealogical' alerts us that Foucault will feature, but equally influential in shaping the analysis are German media theory, systems theory, and above all various contributions from information science.Moreover, Keenan has mastered the technological complexities of the various means of interception that have been used over the centuries, to the extent of being able to make them intelligible to readers with little technical knowledge.Very few people, certainly not including me, are conversant with all these intellectual sources and fields of knowledge, which makes reading the book difficult but stimulating and reviewing it a challenge.This review will reflect my own competences as a public lawyer with an intellectual background in history.It would be fascinating to read a review written from a different disciplinary perspective such as information science and compare the different insights that each reviewer derived from the book, the criticisms offered and the overall evaluations.It might seem like the reviews were of different books.In some respects the author understates the extent of his achievement.Though not a straightforward history, there is a great deal of solid exposition of developments in the practices of interception of communications, drawn from a wide range of primary sources, that gives the reader a picture both of occurrences at particular moments and of evolution over time.Keenan is concerned with how various means of communication between private individuals and members of organisations, intended to be communicated solely between/among themselves, have had that privacy broken into by various official agencies.His approach is a sort of technological determinism, intellectually parallel but in practice alternative to economic determinism.It can both be illuminating and produce statements of the obvious.