The various authors in this book are activists and scholars associated, in one way or another, with the Human Rights Caucus of the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). They share a “firm commitment to promoting human rights standards as an essential baseline for the assessment and governance of the GIS [global information society]” (p. 7). To that end, the book analyzes how the development of public policy on GIS issues affects the protection and promotion of human rights. How are rights like freedom of expression, to privacy, to freedom from discrimination, and women's rights affected by the rapid spread of the GIS? As the book's introduction suggests, “there is a pressing need to think through how these rights apply in a globally networked and information-intensive world, identify specific policies and practices that could be contrary to their preservation and promotion, and suggest specific reforms that would rectify such problems” (p. 26).

This approach has not, the book avers, been undertaken in any systematic way before. By doing so, the authors suggest, we will better understand how changes in information and communications technology (ICT) impact on the global human rights regime. This promises, prima facie, to be of value for lawyers and activists working on these issues but, despite passing reference in the introduction's bibliography to works on “legalization”—Kenneth W Abbott et al., “The Concept of Legalization,” in Judith Goldstein et al., eds., Legalization and World Politics, a special issue of International Organization 54 (Summer 2000): 401–19—and “epistemic communities”—Peter M Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination, a special issue of International Organization 45, (Winter 1992)—there is no concerted attempt to view the issues under discussion through the theoretical apparatus these ideas provide. This limits the value of such a work to political scientists, as does the lack of any sustained attention to the politics of global regulatory regimes (on which more as follows).

In the various chapters, prominent rights are enumerated and assessed in the context of changes in information availability and ownership, enhanced state surveillance, intellectual property rights regulation, monitoring and censorship of Internet material, the organization of resistance to state oppression, and more. While the book has no overall conclusion, almost every chapter points to both the liberatory potential of the GIS and the concomitant risks of more extensive intrusion into our lives. Its contributors combine this observation of the trade-offs that the GIS poses with an awareness of the impact of the so-called digital divide on access to hi-tech sources of knowledge and communication in areas of the developing world.

Human Rights in the Global Information Society provides fairly thorough critical analyses of the implications that various responses to changes in GIS policy pose for human rights, even if it can be a touch credulous about how much even Western state officials actually care about the public interest dimension of that policy. No one, or rather no one not on the payroll of a multinational corporation, or in the intelligence and security services of the state, could read the accounts by Robin Gross (chap. 4) on intellectual property rights, by Gus Hosein (pp. 135–40) on biometrics, by Charley Lewis (pp. 171–74) on e-mail snooping, and by Meryem Marzouki (pp. 204–13) on police and corporate power without feeling a little unnerved. Lewis (pp. 152–53), and Kay Raseroka (chap. 3) give us more encouraging news of the way technology and information services can aid political resistance and social inclusion. The book therefore works best when we get focused discussion with some empirical content (the chapters by Gross and Marzouki being perhaps the strongest).

As for weaknesses, the book has at least two, in my view. Firstly, the authors' contention that the GIS–human rights link needs detailed attention is not backed by a strong enough argument as to why the global human rights regime specifically is the lens we should use. Why not civil liberties, social justice, antiglobalization, social and solidarity movements, republicanism, virtue-based ethics, and more? For some of these alternative, more “political” forms of organization, the hegemonic discourse of rights is part of the problem, functioning as a dominant language of global governance that poses a threat to diversity, agency, and empowerment at the local level. An obvious example is the way the Children's Rights Convention, for example, opens up a space for monitoring and surveillance, by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations, of social practices in the South. The likely audience for this book is, therefore, those preconverted to the human rights discourse, especially lawyers.

Several of the later chapters—on discrimination, women's rights, minorities, and development—tell us nothing substantively new about global structures of inequality, marginalization, and injustice by virtue of being viewed through their manifestation in GIS-related policy issues. (And vice versa: There is no critical interrogation of human rights standards—they are taken as a fixed set of agreed-upon global rules against which the promises and threats of GIS policymaking are assessed.) The ways in which oppression—of the gendered, ethnic, racial, cultural, and class-based varieties—works long predates the development of GIS. When Heike Jensen (pp. 246–52) talks about the lack of women in ICT careers, and about gendered ICT ideology, she could have said the same about almost any other sector of the economy. Because there is little or no reflection about human rights themselves, there is also a tendency not to see how ambiguous rights language can be, meaning that one of the obvious problems with rights—that they flatly contradict each other in some cases—is elided. There is little mention anywhere, for example, of the right to property, and Mandana Zarrehparvar's discussion (chap. 9) of the relationship between free expression and hate speech is thin (to put it mildly).

Second, if the book has little to offer in terms of new thinking about rights, it also lacks any real political punch. Throughout the chapters, the way in which certain states and particular industries are building up a disturbing level of control over what we consume and when we consume it is often mentioned, but there is no “big picture” to tie this all together. Such a chapter was sorely needed and suggests that the project's contributors were drawn together more by the topic in general than by any shared analytical framework about the GIS. The ways in which the U.S. state willfully acts to advance the interests of its firms by using multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization to carve out and protect bigger markets is given minimal sustained political analysis. Many of those who benefit from the GIS—middle-income Western consumers—also benefit from the protections provided by the extension of monitoring and surveillance (whether in terms of employment, personal security, pension fund investments, leisure activities, tourism, and so forth). The absence of a framing chapter that describes the alliance of neoliberalism, emergent transnational security and intelligence structures, and social classes gives the book a narrower appeal than it need otherwise have had, and certainly means that it has relatively little to offer to a political scientist.