Right now, you are under surveillance. This comprehensive expose exposes how the US government collaborated with tech firms, data brokers, and advertising to track us using our home equipment and cell phones.
"A fascinating, occasionally terrifying, timely, startling, and revealing examination of the decline of privacy in the digital age."—Kirkus Reviews
"I was given a peek into a new kind of surveillance program that night—one that tracks everyone—that was a whole new world."
Journalist Byron Tau has been putting together a hidden narrative for the last five years, starting with a fortuitous meeting at a dinner party. This narrative explains how the internet and all digital devices in the globe evolved into systems for intelligence gathering, monitoring, and surveillance.
Of course, monitoring is pervasive in today's environment. Most of us are only vaguely aware of this: Have you ever had the impression that an advertisement is "following" you throughout the internet? However, most people would be shocked to learn how much information our phones, laptops, houses, credit cards, and even the tires beneath our vehicles may disclose about our habits and behavior. An incredible quantity of priceless information on each and every one of us has been gathered by all of this surveillance. The U.S. government is the largest buyer of the data, which is for sale.
Working with several nameless firms, many of which were dispersed around the suburbs of Northern Virginia, the U.S. government developed an astoundingly expansive domestic and international surveillance infrastructure in the years after 9/11, one that allowed it to snoop on almost everyone on the globe. The only rule in this cottage sector of data brokers and government officials is to "get everything you can." The end effect is a bizarre world where marketing businesses own military contractor subsidiaries and defense contractors have marketing companies. Additionally, hardly nobody in the public is aware of it.
Means of Control is the definitive tale of our perilous great bargain—ubiquitous, inexpensive technology, but at what cost? It is both sobering and
revelatory.
