Suelette Dreyfus

Career

Dreyfus' work in e-Health has focussed on the patient information experience in the health system and the role of technology in error incident reporting in hospital settings. She has co-invented innovative prototypes in information design for pathology reports with the aim of transforming them from simple lab information outputs, into multi-layered information tools. These tools would then allow doctors to improve communication with patients, and then patients with their families regarding the status of disease in progressive and chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. In such diseases patient adherence to lifestyle, exercise, diet and medication regimes can have a significant impact on diseases progression. Knowledge and understanding of disease status have been shown to improve adherence.

Her research in e-Education has focussed on using social media to teach foreign language to English-speaking primary school students, particularly for difficult languages that require more hours of practice such as Asian languages.

Dreyfus has written on the importance of protecting Freedom of Information access (FOI), the problems of information asymmetry and ‘tool asymmetry’ between the individual citizen and the state, and the trend of ‘security clearance creep’. She stated, ‘Information Systems are a good way to organize data, but they’re not a form of democratic, free and open government.’ She gave a speech to 300 senior civil servants in Australia on this topic at the ANZSOG annual conference in August 2015.

Underground

She is the author of the 1997 cult classic Underground: Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. The book describes the exploits of a group of Australian, American, and British hackers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, among them Julian Assange who is credited as a researcher for the book.

The book was first published under the Mandarin imprint (Random House Australia). The author subsequently released it in e-version in 2001 for free, which was unusual at the time for a professionally published author at a major publishing house. More than 400,000 copies of the book were downloaded for free in the following two years. She donated the e-book to Project Gutenberg’s library so it would be available in perpetuity to the public, in various text formats, for free. The introduction written specifically for the Project Gutenberg edition states that another purpose of the donation was so that the book would be easily accessible by the vision-impaired.

In 2011, a new edition of the book was published, with updated chapters. The book has average a reader score of 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon. On Goodreads the book has an average score of 4.15 out of 5 based on 373 ratings.

Underground has been translated into seven other languages, including French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional) and Russian. The German edition incorporated a QR reader code into the front cover design which took the reader to a secret recorded audio message about the book. The fact that the cover design was actually a functional QR code was not publicised nor documented inside the book itself but was left for the curious reader to discover on his or her own. Thus it echoed the hacker discovery experiences described in the work’s literary non-fiction stories. It was published in 2012 by German publisher Heyne Taschenbuch in paperback, having been first published in hardback by Benediction Classics in Berlin in 2011. The German, French and Spanish editions of the books have different introductions and/or conclusions, with unique commentary for each edition, written by Dreyfus. Dreyfus is represented by literary agents Curtis Brown in Australia and the UK.

Dreyfus was an Associate Producer and interview subject for the documentary In the Realm of the Hackers, inspired by Underground, in 2003. Underground was also the basis for a 2012 film by Australian screenwriter and director Robert Connolly.

Journalism

She has been a contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Independent, and The Age, as well as to radio programs including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Late Night Live with Philip Adams. She trained and worked as a staff reporter for a daily newspaper in Australia.

In 2015 and 2016, Dreyfus has run training for journalists in a major media organisation and in a journalism school on digital and physical methods of protecting sources and data.

Her essays have also appeared in The Conversation, discussing the importance of protecting public access to strong encryption, the need for legal protections for whistleblowers, and the security paradox of legislation enforcing retention of metadata for two years for everyone in Australia.