Explores five issues related to technology's impact on privacy and access to information--regulation and licensing of the press, electronic surveillance, invasion of privacy, copyright, and policy-making and regulation. The importance of First Amendment rights and civil liberties in forming a coherent national information policy is stressed.…

The first of two articles on privacy considers its development in U.S. tort law and its social and ethical aspects in the context of changing technology. The second, by Linowes and Bennett, examines the role of data-protection as a policy problem using the concepts and approaches of political science. (Author/EM)