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They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy
They Know Everything About You is a groundbreaking exposé of how government agencies and tech corporations monitor virtually every aspect of our lives, and a fierce defense of privacy and democracy.
The revelation that the government has access to a vast trove of personal online data demonstrates that we already live in a surveillance society. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA are using Silicon Valley corporate partners as their data spies. Seemingly progressive tech companies are joining forces with snooping government agencies to create a brave new world of wired tyranny.
Life in the digital age poses an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional liberties, which guarantee a wall of privacy between the individual and the government. The basic assumption of democracy requires the ability of the individual to experiment with ideas and associations within a protected zone, as secured by the Constitution. The unobserved moment embodies the most basic of human rights, yet it is being squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.
Robert Scheer argues that the information revolution, while a source of public enlightenment, contains the seeds of freedom's destruction in the form of a surveillance state that exceeds the wildest dream of the most ingenious dictator. The technology of surveillance, unless vigorously resisted, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.
The revelation that the government has access to a vast trove of personal online data demonstrates that we already live in a surveillance society. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA are using Silicon Valley corporate partners as their data spies. Seemingly progressive tech companies are joining forces with snooping government agencies to create a brave new world of wired tyranny.
Life in the digital age poses an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional liberties, which guarantee a wall of privacy between the individual and the government. The basic assumption of democracy requires the ability of the individual to experiment with ideas and associations within a protected zone, as secured by the Constitution. The unobserved moment embodies the most basic of human rights, yet it is being squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.
Robert Scheer argues that the information revolution, while a source of public enlightenment, contains the seeds of freedom's destruction in the form of a surveillance state that exceeds the wildest dream of the most ingenious dictator. The technology of surveillance, unless vigorously resisted, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2015
27 people are currently reading
440 people want to read
About the author
Robert Scheer
52 books34 followersRobert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine Truthdig.
Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.
During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.
In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.
After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.
After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.
Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.
Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.
During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.
In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.
After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.
After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.
Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
February 20, 2016
I'm in a quandary, a pickle, a trick bag, a jam. They know everything. Not only about me. But also about you. So they know I'm writing this review now and it may come back to haunt me. I want to share with you what I've learned from this book. But sooner or later, one day or another, I may regret writing this review. And you may regret reading it. Like every serious writer I know about the First Amendment. And the Fourth Amendment about illegal search and seizure without probable cause and a warrant. I'm not paranoid. But as a poet, I am perceptive. I dreamed a dream that I lived in a free country. But I don't. None of us does. Not any more. Because they know everything. But who are they? NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS. Somehow this Federal, alphabet soup bought all this technology with your hard earned tax dollars and they are using it against you. They mean to scare you and intimidate you with the power of their technology. They want to keep you safe. They want you to be a good citizen. They want you to pay more taxes than multi-billion dollar corporations sending money offshore to tax safe havens. They want to keep away the bad guys. They want to go to war to sell guns and oil. They want to know what you're up to. No worries because if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care about giving up your freedom so they can protect you from the bad guys? You are simply not safe here. People are out to get you. They have weapons of mass destruction. It's easily worth the trade-off. Life is dangerous, after all, as they have told you countless times. There could be a red alert any day now. That could really up the ante. But they know how to contact you. If you use a search engine, they know what you buy. If you use Google maps, they know where you are and where you've been and where you live. They know your financial transactions, credit card information, loans, where you work, gender, marital status, age, street address. They know about your love life. They know what people think about you. Are you a member of any clubs? They know about it. You told them all about yourself on Facebook. Here's the part which immediately affects us: they know the books you read and may even write. They even know what you think about the books you read. Take this review as an example. Let's face it: you can kiss your privacy goodbye. It's gone. It was fun for a while, whimsical... I wax sentimental just thinking about all the good times I had in my privacy. I miss it so much. Sniff, sniff. I shed a tear at its passage. But don't bemoan its passing: I'm just glad I had it for so many years. So what's to be done? Become a Luddite? The case for this philosophy of brutes and monoliths and even the simple-minded among us is getting stronger every day. Move into the wilderness out of range? Tempting, tempting. Move to another country? But where? They speak English here. Not the King's English. But they speak the jargon, the argot, the vernacular: something which resembles a country bumpkin, slang version of it. No, I think not. I am highly biased in favor of the English of the King against whom we rebelled as a nation due in part to his penchant for illegal search and seizure. Pandora's Box has been opened and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle: just ask Mr. Snowden. Now, I've gone and done it: this review will probably pop-up on some screen on the plains of Utah or in Virginia somewhere or Google. They'll think I'm disgruntled or maybe unmanageable or, God forbid, an unpatriotic citizen. If you have an ounce of perception and you see life as it is, where we live, it makes them angry. Your views agitate them. And they care what you think. Red lights blink upon consoles. Little blips and bleeps and flashing text comes out of their machines. And you just never know whether the persons who see all these red flags, as they are called in the business of security, have any sense of humanity. They may want to screw with you just for fun. They may misunderstand you. They may think you are a danger to your fellow man. They may lack a sense of humor or irony. They may want to destroy you utterly. It's a kind of Russian Roulette as to who is reading all this big data they've scooped up about you. What do you know about them? Probably not as much as they know about you. How could you? They are tight-lipped. They're sworn to secrecy. Has your computer crashed recently? It could be them. It's one of their calling cards to let you know they're watching. FISA Court? Don't make me laugh: we're not worth it to them. It's a one-way street and we're heading down it the wrong way for all they know. Your file is vast. It could fill a library. As Whitman wrote, "I am a multitude." Have you read your personal file lately? They have. And they are paid to keep you in line. So here is my best advice: reclaim your First and Fourth Amendment Rights. How? Buy the best encryption that you can afford and live your life as our Founding Fathers intended. Be responsible. Love your nation. But be free. Because then they won't know everything about you. But rather only those things you want them to know. And that should suffice. Because if you're not doing anything wrong, they should have nothing to fear from you. Spare yourself and "Like" this review at your own peril. Because they're watching. And they know everything about you. How are you not overcome by the chilling effect of it?
July 24, 2015
By happy coincidence my two latest library books were delivered at the same time: a hardback on Shakespeare’s coded writing, Shadowplay, by Clare Asquith and a digital copy of Robert Scheer’s They Know Everything About You.
Though separated by almost 500 years they share a number of common themes: manipulation of the law, curtailment of individual rights and abuse of power.
It’s tempting to think of a meeting between Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and his present day NSA counterparts. How he would have marveled at, and enjoyed, the apparatus of the watchers of the modern state.
Along with William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Walsingham turned England into a police state. Feared threats from Catholic plotters at home and Jesuit infiltrators abroad were met with manhunts, torture, extracted confessions and executions.
Fast forward to the post 9-11 period and substitute al-Qaeda or ISIS for the Catholic menace and the same tactics and justifications are being made for the extraordinary powers needed to protect the homeland.
Since 9-11 the US has spent more than $500bn on intelligence, according to veteran journalist Scheer.
Following the attack on the World Trade Center, “priorities shifted from viewing the preservation of individual liberty as the guarantor of freedom to the justification of unbridled government power exercised in the name of preserving national security”.
And we’ve all gone along with it. We’ve become inured to intrusion and surrendered our privacy.
We accept CCTVs recording our presence, we know our emails are sifted for keywords, we willingly surrender our location history, we helpfully codify our social networks, we give up our relationship status and a million other things without being compelled to do so. We do it because on balance it makes our lives easier; we’ve traded convenience for privacy.
So far, so yawn. But Scheer reminds us there’s also a darker side to today’s unprecedented level of data gathering: “The point of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was was to show that the public would come to accept totalitarian intrusion as part of the normal fabric of life, as something that was actually good for them”.
Except, of course, that it’s not. Scheer contends that the US surveillance state, governed by secrecy, drew the country into a futile search for weapons of mass destruction, a war with Iraq, and laid the foundation for the emergence of a jihadi caliphate hundreds of times bigger and better organized than al-Qaeda.
The war on terror had become a war on the public’s right to know, a bipartisan crusade that destroyed the foundation of democracy – an informed public.
It was only through whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures that we came to learn digital behemoths like Google, Facebook, AoL and Microsoft had been compelled (some more willingly than others) to surrender vast amounts of data to the state surveillance apparatus.
The dirty secret of the internet was that it was privacy and not just advertising that was being sold.
Scheer states: “While there is no doubt the commercial exploitation of our most intimate practices to enhance advertising sales is destructive of privacy, it is a qualitatively different assault than secret monitoring by a government agency.”
He argues that government intrusions subvert constitutional intent and basic rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of private space to collect one’s thoughts and papers free from the intimidating surveillance of government.
All the more surprising then that President Obama, a former constitutional law professor, has not only continued Bush-era surveillance powers but has expanded “on that horrid legacy” by cracking down on the press and prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous US presidents combined.
It is here that Scheer delivers his most withering criticism of the president using a campaign speech the then-Senator Obama delivered in 2007 to deride President Bush’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand”.
His own administration, he said, would provide tools to take out terrorists without undermining the Constitution: “That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime…No more ignoring the law when it is not convenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works…”
Scheer’s analysis is a gift to critics of the Obama administration but his frustration goes far deeper than simple partisan politics. He is neither a hysterical commentator, nor a soapbox scaremonger, but a man who believes the nation is sleepwalking on a dangerous path towards its own destruction.
In a rallying call for citizen action he cites the dictum that: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any”.
And he warns: “If we persist in apathetically accepting the privacy invasions of corporations and the predations of our own government – perhaps believing the war is already lost – our dystopian future is clear: a world where our private and public spheres are the same, where any agency or business or even individual who can afford the fee can scrutinize us at their leisure, and penalize us for any perceived defect or nonconformity.”
Though separated by almost 500 years they share a number of common themes: manipulation of the law, curtailment of individual rights and abuse of power.
It’s tempting to think of a meeting between Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and his present day NSA counterparts. How he would have marveled at, and enjoyed, the apparatus of the watchers of the modern state.
Along with William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Walsingham turned England into a police state. Feared threats from Catholic plotters at home and Jesuit infiltrators abroad were met with manhunts, torture, extracted confessions and executions.
Fast forward to the post 9-11 period and substitute al-Qaeda or ISIS for the Catholic menace and the same tactics and justifications are being made for the extraordinary powers needed to protect the homeland.
Since 9-11 the US has spent more than $500bn on intelligence, according to veteran journalist Scheer.
Following the attack on the World Trade Center, “priorities shifted from viewing the preservation of individual liberty as the guarantor of freedom to the justification of unbridled government power exercised in the name of preserving national security”.
And we’ve all gone along with it. We’ve become inured to intrusion and surrendered our privacy.
We accept CCTVs recording our presence, we know our emails are sifted for keywords, we willingly surrender our location history, we helpfully codify our social networks, we give up our relationship status and a million other things without being compelled to do so. We do it because on balance it makes our lives easier; we’ve traded convenience for privacy.
So far, so yawn. But Scheer reminds us there’s also a darker side to today’s unprecedented level of data gathering: “The point of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was was to show that the public would come to accept totalitarian intrusion as part of the normal fabric of life, as something that was actually good for them”.
Except, of course, that it’s not. Scheer contends that the US surveillance state, governed by secrecy, drew the country into a futile search for weapons of mass destruction, a war with Iraq, and laid the foundation for the emergence of a jihadi caliphate hundreds of times bigger and better organized than al-Qaeda.
The war on terror had become a war on the public’s right to know, a bipartisan crusade that destroyed the foundation of democracy – an informed public.
It was only through whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures that we came to learn digital behemoths like Google, Facebook, AoL and Microsoft had been compelled (some more willingly than others) to surrender vast amounts of data to the state surveillance apparatus.
The dirty secret of the internet was that it was privacy and not just advertising that was being sold.
Scheer states: “While there is no doubt the commercial exploitation of our most intimate practices to enhance advertising sales is destructive of privacy, it is a qualitatively different assault than secret monitoring by a government agency.”
He argues that government intrusions subvert constitutional intent and basic rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of private space to collect one’s thoughts and papers free from the intimidating surveillance of government.
All the more surprising then that President Obama, a former constitutional law professor, has not only continued Bush-era surveillance powers but has expanded “on that horrid legacy” by cracking down on the press and prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous US presidents combined.
It is here that Scheer delivers his most withering criticism of the president using a campaign speech the then-Senator Obama delivered in 2007 to deride President Bush’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand”.
His own administration, he said, would provide tools to take out terrorists without undermining the Constitution: “That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime…No more ignoring the law when it is not convenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works…”
Scheer’s analysis is a gift to critics of the Obama administration but his frustration goes far deeper than simple partisan politics. He is neither a hysterical commentator, nor a soapbox scaremonger, but a man who believes the nation is sleepwalking on a dangerous path towards its own destruction.
In a rallying call for citizen action he cites the dictum that: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any”.
And he warns: “If we persist in apathetically accepting the privacy invasions of corporations and the predations of our own government – perhaps believing the war is already lost – our dystopian future is clear: a world where our private and public spheres are the same, where any agency or business or even individual who can afford the fee can scrutinize us at their leisure, and penalize us for any perceived defect or nonconformity.”
July 9, 2016
I'm a fan of Robert Scheer from his website TruthDig as well as his weekly appearances on one of my favorite podcasts, "Left, Right and Center" from KCRW in Los Angeles. This book is a great companion read to Glenn Greenwald's "No Place to Hide," which is also about the surveillance state but with a special emphasis on Edward Snowden's revelations. Scheer's book relates modern digital surveillance to the 4th Amendment and how it impacts privacy. It's quite astonishing to read about how every keystroke you make it seems is being logged either by a corporation or by the government, so much of it in the vain hope of catching terrorists. Scheer also lays out why this reasoning is faulty, and convincingly so. I think we see that evidence all around us, as terrorist events keep happening that weren't on anyone's radar - which would seem to argue that all this metadata collection really isn't doing that much good. It's a dry read compared to Greenwald's "spy novel" pace, but well worth the time.
June 20, 2015
Scariest book I've read in years. I haven't slept much since I've finished it. How the hell do you get off this technology ride ? Sadly, this book doesn't tell you. Maybe the sequel will.
May 18, 2015
Like most people, I click through the terms of service agreements of most websites I visit mindlessly. Surely Yelp knowing my location is okay if they're just trying to find me a good restaurant, right? They Know Everything About You takes a penetrating look at this mindset and details the extent to which private corporations - the Googles, Facebooks, and Palantirs of the world - have worked with the United States government in destroying the average citizen's privacy in the name of national security. Scheer makes the argument that all the data collected in the name of, for example, the Patriot act, has not made us safer. It has been a failure to connect the dots, rather than a failure of collecting dots. The story behind Palantir, with the CIA propping it up for most of its early life, really struck me. Scheer also argues for the importance of whistle-blowing and the lack of protections for them. Scheer writes clearly and eloquently about such invasions of privacy and vehemently argues for increased privacy of the people.
March 10, 2019
This is a good book loaded with information about the loss of privacy and the methodical gathering of one's personal information by private and governmental entities for political and economic uses. The author goes into great detail about the history and programs targeting individuals. I don't particularly like the author's style. There was a lot of repetition n quoting Eisenhower and I do not consider Snowden nor Manning as hero "whistle blowers". I do appreciate his outline of the Executive Branch targeting of petsonnel who "leak" information and his discussion of the European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" position. I guess I am just not a fan of "directional writing".
June 30, 2016
There are a lot of footnotes and it seems to be well-researched, but the slant of this book (maybe rightly so) really detracts from the writing. It always sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of the well-read conspiracy theorist nut friend we all seem to know. He can spout the truth all day, but the way he says it shuts out the message.
As I was reading, this felt like it was saying "and THEN do you know what they did? Do you? Oh, I'll tell you what those bastards did, and how."
It's somewhat interesting if you can ignore the slant.
As I was reading, this felt like it was saying "and THEN do you know what they did? Do you? Oh, I'll tell you what those bastards did, and how."
It's somewhat interesting if you can ignore the slant.
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April 10, 2015WHAT BOOKS HAVE YOU BEEN READING, MEMERITAS?
WHY NATIONS FAIL, THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT US AND LOSING GROUND. ALL OF THESE BOOKS ARE BOARING. :(
WHY NATIONS FAIL, THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT US AND LOSING GROUND. ALL OF THESE BOOKS ARE BOARING. :(
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December 16, 2015Well, that was terrifying. Hello NSA, this is my book review!
October 31, 2017
Just a long-ass version of the snowden story? okay I mean there's data here and there (hence the two instead of one), but just long-winded in general
February 3, 2018
Bob Scheer was only one of The Nation's “Trump vs. The Deep State” panelists, but really caught my ear as the editor of Truthdig online and author of They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations And Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy. I’d been bullied by both a violent burglary gang and the nascent Surveillance State when cops & robbers’ computer games bungled through my life while on jury duty in 1994; and then accidentally educated in the egregious logical, moral and factual flaws of computer profiling when I went for a Masters in Library, Archives and Information Studies in 2002, and studied HIPAA health data security in IT for Health Care in 2010 in Seattle.
Now “the business model” guys and gals really have their hands on everything; domestically through deregulation of “database marketing,” and data mining everything from vehicle licenses to Facebook posts and every online or “member services” purchase, making them into instantly integrated and interoperable systems for evaluation of our worth and gullibility as consumers. When one of my daughters bemoaned the price of some online boots being “exactly what I have left in my checking account until my next paycheck,“ I said, “You do online checking and banking, right? They do know not only what style and size you buy and wear, but how much you have to spend, too.” And where you live, of course, for FedEx, Amazon and UPS’ “free delivery,” as well as through the DMV and TSA.
If the crooks in Minneapolis were doing this by phone and observation from their diaper-service truck in 1994, just think of how easy it is now that police budgets, salaries and equipment are fueled by arrests made and jail cells filled through “high tech.” “America First” speed and greed are “public policy” streamlined into the military-industrial complex of the era, parallel Mussolini’s “estato corporativo.” Fascism? What? Where? Not here! Not US! And, of course, criminals aren't using high tech! Oh, no! And who are the criminals if "it's all about MONEY down here?"
“The default,” “opt-in” that we thoughtlessly “AGREE” to becomes “warrantless general searches by the government” and “clear violation of Fourth Amendment protections,” to say nothing of “the ability to alter the thinking or emotions of large numbers of people” nationally or internationally. The differences between “misguided patriotism” (Putin’s phrase re: hacking our election), “terrorism and political activism…” are thin, aiming “at understanding how to control or prevent public dissent inside the United States through surveillance and manipulation of information flows.” This leans hard on “global security,” propaganda and “tactics to engineer public consent for government policies.” (p. 58, 92, 68, 88-89)
The spread of tech-snooping for profit in Silicon Valley hasn’t gone unnoticed in the local press, just published in the back business section or editorial pages on weekends. Palantir’s stealth in devouring Palo Alto real estate as well as “GOP obscures stripping of privacy rights” are touted in the free-market business model to be “for the public good,” (p.129). If you put $20-200 in somebody’s bank account every time they geo-located “suspicious” license plate numbers or facial recognition identifications, (notice who's advertising this link) you can bet it makes surveillance into a fun game, if not a full-time job. Why you could get an army or a flashmob together in a day and a half. Funky spies from Google.com or the Dept. of Education who don't even know they're bankrupting people, throwing them out of their homes, jobs and putting the wrong people in jail or SWAT-Teamed a la Brazil!
I can’t be a book reviewer in the East Bay without praising Cherilyn Parsons’ Bay Area Book Festival that celebrated in downtown Berkeley the weekend of June 3 – 4th, a brilliant and defiant collective wave of “Staying Sane, Awake and Engaged in Dangerous Times.” Ms. Parsons and her staff’s organization of BABF deserves whatever East Bayers present as a combined Oscar and Nobel Prize, second only to the Oakland Women’s March for courageous challenge to authority and East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest for panelists’ audacious non-traditionalism.
I co-organized two very small (75-125 participants) artsy-fartsy-politico conferences in my youth, managed lots of poetry readings and a couple of performances; and the prior planning, multitasking, schmoozing and follow-up; even in the non-digital age; were daunting and exhausting. This person is a consummate event and media organizer and juggler of artistic temperaments with a burnished brain of brass and nerves of steel, I am sure.
BABFs’ resulting quality and quantity of speakers and events were so pungent, diverse, supportive and enlightening that I only had time to briefly marvel at the vast kids’ play and publishers’ areas that accompanied and surrounded them. I was there 9 – 9 Saturday and 10 – 6 Sunday, attending “Witness and Testimony,” “The Long 60s,” “Showdown,” Lindy West (author of Shrill,) “Radical Hope,” “On Power,” “Race and Resistance in the Trump Era,” “Who Is American Poetry?” and most of “Forces of Nature” with Susan Griffin, Starhawk and Joanna Macy; missing many wonderful other concurrent events. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Robert Reich identified the data-collecting and corporate control slippery slope as one of many coming on from his tenure Locked in the Cabinet as Secretary Of Labor with Bill Clinton 1993-97. During his tenure, college chums Bob and Bill went to Washington with little understanding of how the political machine there would chew up, irretrievably distort and bullet back their and the voters' egalitarian, democratic ideals within months. The cheerful cohorts came in with a Democratic Congress and liberal Court, Hillary started wanting to reform health care on the federal level. They all got trounced by the Republican "get tough" and get "Religious" Right in the 1994 midterm "Republican Revolution" election, got branded as out-of-touch "tax and spend liberals" by a public relations style of campaign avalanche.
Sound familiar? The opposition agenda was the same then as now, but somewhat softer and couched in the saintly-sounding ideals of the "Contract with America" that systematically stripped the poor, disabled, women, children, unions, elderly, ill, people of color, immigrants(...) of the few remaining "New Deal" and "Great Society" public benefits, health care and jobs they/ we could get hold of and put shaming, blaming, suffering and prison time in their place. Reich was "Little Bob" to Bill's Robin Hood, but Speaker Newt of Nottingham and his gang of slithery thieves-in-official-clothing were too much for them.
This giving (more) to the rich and taking from the poor began with Reagan's "trickle down" economic policies and then again openly in U S government twenty years after Nixon left the White House. Reich shows us their dirty, all-too-human roots, the back-room banter that stopped grassroots democracy in its tracks. Now everyone thinks they can be James Bond or some big wheeler-dealer just because they have a smartphone and a database telling them what to do with it when. It's like shooting fish in a barrel with the military industrial complex's big guns behind them. "Occupation: Government protection racketeer." I'll bet that doesn't show up on #45s or Steve Bannon's tax forms. (Not unless We The People put it there.)
I’d originally wanted to ask Professor Reich why there were so few women “public policy” expert writers well into 2016 in The American Prospect magazine he’d co-founded, but getting an interview was like Ocean’s Eleven in academia, without the well-oiled support team. Once I got up the hill and found the front door, I totally blew it, politically incorrectly pronouncing his name Milwaukee (German)-style RYK instead of RYSSHHH, and the jig was up. I waited in multiple foyers with his numerous (female) secretaries hinting for a free book or magazine, let alone an interview, but no dice. Policy at Public Policy is obviously tough, but polite. A business card and a smile were not enough.
I figured “public health” at least should have some former nurses or Health and Human Services female policy wonks floating around, but even since Hillary, Warren and Maddow, it’s taken talking heads a long time to say “racism, immigration AND MISOGYNY” as prime movers of the Alt-Right, to say nothing of knowing the difference between an Alt-right woman and one who’s not, letting her get up in front of a camera, be on a CNN panel or write an article in a serious journal. Donna Shalala was Secretary of HHS during the Clinton Administrations, and now we may not be CEOs, but there are lots of us working on / scrambling for decent policies for the public.
I gladly settled for reading Reich's memoir, much more accessible than his recent books and the person himself. Through stark vignettes and deft character studies, Locked proved to be a valuable insight into the threshold of The Era Of U.S. Political Meanness like we've never seen before, the basic outline of the "unimaginable level of cruelty" shriveling public programs of the most vulnerable Americans in the proposed federal budget.
He’s saying the same thing about restoring the middle class, reeducating blue-collar whites and people of color for modern jobs and respecting the poor, minorities, elderly, (women) and disabled as equal citizens as he was then. He just seems a lot more angry and fed up when they only give him 3 minutes on TV and we/ he’s still seeing the same crap going down over the past 20-something years ever since, with some dodos on split-screen next to him shouting him down and lying through their teeth.
Doublespeak is now a fine art practiced by almost everyone trying to make a buck, in government and out. Concepts of “free trade,” “tough love,” "alternative truth," “the banking industry,” “corporate welfare” and “tax cuts for the wealthy” are accepted as “America First” entirely legitimate public policies. Lobbyists’ stranglehold on government known as “Citizens United” seems to be the name of the game of wealth extraction through corporate control, at least ten times more viciously now than it was then.
Reich's kind wisdom and academic innocence in Locked In the Cabinet is endearing, but we know where it ends up. Problem is, for most people, it’s no game. If money is power or not, I’m ready for his new request, his “…there are many think tanks in Washington that need people to speak truth to power. In fact, even more so now than ever before, the public needs to know the truth…we’re blessed to be in the capital of progressive America – a nation within a nation called California.” [ii]
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” Fortune cookie from Long Life Vegi House. Go Cherilyn & Bay Books! Go Bobs! Go Berkeley! Go Warriors!
We may be a small and goofy-looking nodule on the West Coast; but we’re paying attention, focused and smart. And we know if we want to move forward, we're going to have to ALL play fair TOGETHER, and as a TEAM. RIGHT?
WARRRRRRIIOOOORRRRRRRSSS!
[ii](Robert Reich, edited by Beth Leuin, Celeste Middleton and Andrew Wilson, “A Conversation with Robert Reich,” Berkeley Public Policy Journal, Spring 2017) Reich, Robert B., Locked In the Cabinet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1997.
Scheer, Robert, with Sara Beladi. They know everything about you : how data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy. New York : Nation Books, [2015]
Now “the business model” guys and gals really have their hands on everything; domestically through deregulation of “database marketing,” and data mining everything from vehicle licenses to Facebook posts and every online or “member services” purchase, making them into instantly integrated and interoperable systems for evaluation of our worth and gullibility as consumers. When one of my daughters bemoaned the price of some online boots being “exactly what I have left in my checking account until my next paycheck,“ I said, “You do online checking and banking, right? They do know not only what style and size you buy and wear, but how much you have to spend, too.” And where you live, of course, for FedEx, Amazon and UPS’ “free delivery,” as well as through the DMV and TSA.
If the crooks in Minneapolis were doing this by phone and observation from their diaper-service truck in 1994, just think of how easy it is now that police budgets, salaries and equipment are fueled by arrests made and jail cells filled through “high tech.” “America First” speed and greed are “public policy” streamlined into the military-industrial complex of the era, parallel Mussolini’s “estato corporativo.” Fascism? What? Where? Not here! Not US! And, of course, criminals aren't using high tech! Oh, no! And who are the criminals if "it's all about MONEY down here?"
“The default,” “opt-in” that we thoughtlessly “AGREE” to becomes “warrantless general searches by the government” and “clear violation of Fourth Amendment protections,” to say nothing of “the ability to alter the thinking or emotions of large numbers of people” nationally or internationally. The differences between “misguided patriotism” (Putin’s phrase re: hacking our election), “terrorism and political activism…” are thin, aiming “at understanding how to control or prevent public dissent inside the United States through surveillance and manipulation of information flows.” This leans hard on “global security,” propaganda and “tactics to engineer public consent for government policies.” (p. 58, 92, 68, 88-89)
The spread of tech-snooping for profit in Silicon Valley hasn’t gone unnoticed in the local press, just published in the back business section or editorial pages on weekends. Palantir’s stealth in devouring Palo Alto real estate as well as “GOP obscures stripping of privacy rights” are touted in the free-market business model to be “for the public good,” (p.129). If you put $20-200 in somebody’s bank account every time they geo-located “suspicious” license plate numbers or facial recognition identifications, (notice who's advertising this link) you can bet it makes surveillance into a fun game, if not a full-time job. Why you could get an army or a flashmob together in a day and a half. Funky spies from Google.com or the Dept. of Education who don't even know they're bankrupting people, throwing them out of their homes, jobs and putting the wrong people in jail or SWAT-Teamed a la Brazil!
I can’t be a book reviewer in the East Bay without praising Cherilyn Parsons’ Bay Area Book Festival that celebrated in downtown Berkeley the weekend of June 3 – 4th, a brilliant and defiant collective wave of “Staying Sane, Awake and Engaged in Dangerous Times.” Ms. Parsons and her staff’s organization of BABF deserves whatever East Bayers present as a combined Oscar and Nobel Prize, second only to the Oakland Women’s March for courageous challenge to authority and East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest for panelists’ audacious non-traditionalism.
I co-organized two very small (75-125 participants) artsy-fartsy-politico conferences in my youth, managed lots of poetry readings and a couple of performances; and the prior planning, multitasking, schmoozing and follow-up; even in the non-digital age; were daunting and exhausting. This person is a consummate event and media organizer and juggler of artistic temperaments with a burnished brain of brass and nerves of steel, I am sure.
BABFs’ resulting quality and quantity of speakers and events were so pungent, diverse, supportive and enlightening that I only had time to briefly marvel at the vast kids’ play and publishers’ areas that accompanied and surrounded them. I was there 9 – 9 Saturday and 10 – 6 Sunday, attending “Witness and Testimony,” “The Long 60s,” “Showdown,” Lindy West (author of Shrill,) “Radical Hope,” “On Power,” “Race and Resistance in the Trump Era,” “Who Is American Poetry?” and most of “Forces of Nature” with Susan Griffin, Starhawk and Joanna Macy; missing many wonderful other concurrent events. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Robert Reich identified the data-collecting and corporate control slippery slope as one of many coming on from his tenure Locked in the Cabinet as Secretary Of Labor with Bill Clinton 1993-97. During his tenure, college chums Bob and Bill went to Washington with little understanding of how the political machine there would chew up, irretrievably distort and bullet back their and the voters' egalitarian, democratic ideals within months. The cheerful cohorts came in with a Democratic Congress and liberal Court, Hillary started wanting to reform health care on the federal level. They all got trounced by the Republican "get tough" and get "Religious" Right in the 1994 midterm "Republican Revolution" election, got branded as out-of-touch "tax and spend liberals" by a public relations style of campaign avalanche.
Sound familiar? The opposition agenda was the same then as now, but somewhat softer and couched in the saintly-sounding ideals of the "Contract with America" that systematically stripped the poor, disabled, women, children, unions, elderly, ill, people of color, immigrants(...) of the few remaining "New Deal" and "Great Society" public benefits, health care and jobs they/ we could get hold of and put shaming, blaming, suffering and prison time in their place. Reich was "Little Bob" to Bill's Robin Hood, but Speaker Newt of Nottingham and his gang of slithery thieves-in-official-clothing were too much for them.
This giving (more) to the rich and taking from the poor began with Reagan's "trickle down" economic policies and then again openly in U S government twenty years after Nixon left the White House. Reich shows us their dirty, all-too-human roots, the back-room banter that stopped grassroots democracy in its tracks. Now everyone thinks they can be James Bond or some big wheeler-dealer just because they have a smartphone and a database telling them what to do with it when. It's like shooting fish in a barrel with the military industrial complex's big guns behind them. "Occupation: Government protection racketeer." I'll bet that doesn't show up on #45s or Steve Bannon's tax forms. (Not unless We The People put it there.)
I’d originally wanted to ask Professor Reich why there were so few women “public policy” expert writers well into 2016 in The American Prospect magazine he’d co-founded, but getting an interview was like Ocean’s Eleven in academia, without the well-oiled support team. Once I got up the hill and found the front door, I totally blew it, politically incorrectly pronouncing his name Milwaukee (German)-style RYK instead of RYSSHHH, and the jig was up. I waited in multiple foyers with his numerous (female) secretaries hinting for a free book or magazine, let alone an interview, but no dice. Policy at Public Policy is obviously tough, but polite. A business card and a smile were not enough.
I figured “public health” at least should have some former nurses or Health and Human Services female policy wonks floating around, but even since Hillary, Warren and Maddow, it’s taken talking heads a long time to say “racism, immigration AND MISOGYNY” as prime movers of the Alt-Right, to say nothing of knowing the difference between an Alt-right woman and one who’s not, letting her get up in front of a camera, be on a CNN panel or write an article in a serious journal. Donna Shalala was Secretary of HHS during the Clinton Administrations, and now we may not be CEOs, but there are lots of us working on / scrambling for decent policies for the public.
I gladly settled for reading Reich's memoir, much more accessible than his recent books and the person himself. Through stark vignettes and deft character studies, Locked proved to be a valuable insight into the threshold of The Era Of U.S. Political Meanness like we've never seen before, the basic outline of the "unimaginable level of cruelty" shriveling public programs of the most vulnerable Americans in the proposed federal budget.
He’s saying the same thing about restoring the middle class, reeducating blue-collar whites and people of color for modern jobs and respecting the poor, minorities, elderly, (women) and disabled as equal citizens as he was then. He just seems a lot more angry and fed up when they only give him 3 minutes on TV and we/ he’s still seeing the same crap going down over the past 20-something years ever since, with some dodos on split-screen next to him shouting him down and lying through their teeth.
Doublespeak is now a fine art practiced by almost everyone trying to make a buck, in government and out. Concepts of “free trade,” “tough love,” "alternative truth," “the banking industry,” “corporate welfare” and “tax cuts for the wealthy” are accepted as “America First” entirely legitimate public policies. Lobbyists’ stranglehold on government known as “Citizens United” seems to be the name of the game of wealth extraction through corporate control, at least ten times more viciously now than it was then.
Reich's kind wisdom and academic innocence in Locked In the Cabinet is endearing, but we know where it ends up. Problem is, for most people, it’s no game. If money is power or not, I’m ready for his new request, his “…there are many think tanks in Washington that need people to speak truth to power. In fact, even more so now than ever before, the public needs to know the truth…we’re blessed to be in the capital of progressive America – a nation within a nation called California.” [ii]
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” Fortune cookie from Long Life Vegi House. Go Cherilyn & Bay Books! Go Bobs! Go Berkeley! Go Warriors!
We may be a small and goofy-looking nodule on the West Coast; but we’re paying attention, focused and smart. And we know if we want to move forward, we're going to have to ALL play fair TOGETHER, and as a TEAM. RIGHT?
WARRRRRRIIOOOORRRRRRRSSS!
[ii](Robert Reich, edited by Beth Leuin, Celeste Middleton and Andrew Wilson, “A Conversation with Robert Reich,” Berkeley Public Policy Journal, Spring 2017) Reich, Robert B., Locked In the Cabinet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1997.
Scheer, Robert, with Sara Beladi. They know everything about you : how data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy. New York : Nation Books, [2015]
April 6, 2024
Reading this book for the first time in 2024, almost a decade after it was published, it is amazing just how accurate much of Scheer’s book turned out to be and how prophetic it was too. While it felt like it slanted a bit conservative (not necessary a bad thing), I did appreciate Scheer’s willingness to lambast both Republican (ie Bush) and Democrat (ie Obama) presidencies for their hypocritical whittling of the right to privacy afforded by the fourth amendment. I also appreciated the historical context provided, the look at the impact of Snowden’s bombshell leaks, and just how much Scheer feared a totalitarian state created by our digital existence. If only he knew what TikTok was going to do. And, his allusions and references to Huxley’s “Brave New World” are feeling ever more apropos.
December 1, 2020
Yes. They know. And?
Scheer is one of those leeches who wants attention. And he spreads fear in order to get the attention he needs.
The text itself is a mess. Right. The Corporations do have access to data. But it's because the people voluntarily give that data, and they get something they want in return for the given data, from finding new friends to free storage for their photos and emails.
Now, the government also has access to data. And given the data can be used to put people in jail for thought crime, that is a big issue. Yet, Scheer knows his good life is in part thanks to him taking his cut from the taxes collected. So he won't bother the Government with such trivialities and tone the dissent down to 'snooping government agencies'.
Finally, about democracy, well, this is just hysteria to get some paying gigs for himself.
Scheer is one of those leeches who wants attention. And he spreads fear in order to get the attention he needs.
The text itself is a mess. Right. The Corporations do have access to data. But it's because the people voluntarily give that data, and they get something they want in return for the given data, from finding new friends to free storage for their photos and emails.
Now, the government also has access to data. And given the data can be used to put people in jail for thought crime, that is a big issue. Yet, Scheer knows his good life is in part thanks to him taking his cut from the taxes collected. So he won't bother the Government with such trivialities and tone the dissent down to 'snooping government agencies'.
Finally, about democracy, well, this is just hysteria to get some paying gigs for himself.
February 19, 2018
The ease and convenient reliance on technology to provide information without the enlightenment of the cultural, political, economic, academic and ground research knowledge in its proper context places all of us including the ones in governmental power into confused lull of belief in data computation prowess. Whether it's silicon Valley, capitalism and consumerism driven by advertising or purchasing dollars. We risk the very real danger of non contemplative thoughts.
July 17, 2020
Would have been more eye opening if I didn't already know they know everything about us and use every little piece of data to profit off us and that the government and silicon valley are both doing this, though for different purposes. Essential reading for anyone that doesn't think "it's that bad" or genuinely has no idea what is going on with our data, our privacy, and the insane extents of government surveillance.
February 1, 2022
Eye-opening and at times terrifying. Pairs well with 1984 and Brave New World.
Am I biased because Scheer is my favorite professor? prob. But it really is a stark view into our world and how we treat the people that help us through the tech era.
Am I biased because Scheer is my favorite professor? prob. But it really is a stark view into our world and how we treat the people that help us through the tech era.
September 12, 2019
One of the most important reads in the 21st century.
April 2, 2023
yeah okay
December 20, 2017
Written in 2014, this gives a relatively succinct overview of the revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the NSA as well as the reactions by particular people in government. It also covers the partnerships between corporations (large, global corporations, i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) and government intelligence agencies. The corporations (mostly) make their money by data mining, which most people don't(?) have a problem with because it allows the companies to provide personalized recommendations for them; but the government also dips into the data mining done by the companies.
People who were concerned about the revelations by Snowden believe he should be pardoned - even today in 2017, Snowden is a fugitive, in Russia because his American passport was revoked before he could get to a country offering him asylum. Others, and prominent government officials among them, believe he is a traitor and should be imprisoned.
The book covers the continual prosecution of journalists and their sources, as well as whistleblowers, by both the Bush and Obama administrations. At the time of the writing of the book, there was one being prosecuted that had not had an outcome. Others were indicted on felonies, but pled to lesser charges.....
People who were concerned about the revelations by Snowden believe he should be pardoned - even today in 2017, Snowden is a fugitive, in Russia because his American passport was revoked before he could get to a country offering him asylum. Others, and prominent government officials among them, believe he is a traitor and should be imprisoned.
The book covers the continual prosecution of journalists and their sources, as well as whistleblowers, by both the Bush and Obama administrations. At the time of the writing of the book, there was one being prosecuted that had not had an outcome. Others were indicted on felonies, but pled to lesser charges.....
July 13, 2023
i read this book for a class taught by the professor. i found the information the book contained to be riveting, details were at times insightful, but i do feel like i didn’t finish it (i jumped from chapter to chapter) for a reason that is representative of the problem with the book as a whole.
while the way it is written is accessible, the content is dense and repetitive without any interesting narrative. the average person, interested in pop culture for example, would grow profoundly bored.
this doesn’t negate the importance of the content of this book, and i’m hoping ill come back to it with a pair of fresh eyes ;)
while the way it is written is accessible, the content is dense and repetitive without any interesting narrative. the average person, interested in pop culture for example, would grow profoundly bored.
this doesn’t negate the importance of the content of this book, and i’m hoping ill come back to it with a pair of fresh eyes ;)
January 20, 2017
Politicians who lie, telecom companies that turn over private citizens’ data, government spy agencies finding loopholes around the 4th amendment, prosecuting whistleblowers, threatening (killing?) reporters, mapping the entire internet, none of this is surprising or shocking. Scary, yes, shocking, no. Americans do not seem to care about government surveillance. That is what is shocking. The most important message I took from this book is that ‘liberty does not have to be sacrificed for security’. We should still have the ‘right to privacy in the digital age’.
September 10, 2015
This book editorializes the effects of Edward Snowden's leaks regarding the NSA's overreach and I agree with most Scheer has to say. Further, he sheds new light on the developing relationship between the Washington politicians and the Silicon Valley elite. I wish the book offered more original research and suggestions and less repeating of how serious a threat our loss of privacy is to democracy.
Read
August 29, 2016Surveillance State=Zero Personal Privacy=New Normal
This is a good read that probably just scratches the surface in exposing the tentacles reaching out to grab your personal data. The 24/7/365 collection grab is mind blowing.
Other than educating yourself about who/what/where/when/why/ and how it's currently being done, (and newer/creative ways are always being invented) there is really nothing you can do. Data mining is now ingrained into every aspect of your existence... Sigh...
This is a good read that probably just scratches the surface in exposing the tentacles reaching out to grab your personal data. The 24/7/365 collection grab is mind blowing.
Other than educating yourself about who/what/where/when/why/ and how it's currently being done, (and newer/creative ways are always being invented) there is really nothing you can do. Data mining is now ingrained into every aspect of your existence... Sigh...
February 28, 2020
What is the difference between a company collecting my data and the government collecting my data? A company using your data to advertise to you feels like an invasion of privacy in itself, complete with unwanted solicitation. I was hoping for more clarification in what both parties are actually doing with my information, what can be done about it, and what, among everything, will actually be sourced in this book.
December 1, 2021
i only could bear to read the first half of the book...there was too much repetition of the same message of 'federal agency bad. citizens no safe.'
i think the first few parts were pretty insightful! but it got painful to continue reading cus i felt like i wasnt reading anything new.
i think the first few parts were pretty insightful! but it got painful to continue reading cus i felt like i wasnt reading anything new.
June 20, 2015
More detail than I had read before, but not surprising. Privacy is over. It's great to live in a country where it isn't a big deal right now, but people should understand what it means.
July 17, 2017
“The default,” “opt-in” that we thoughtlessly “AGREE” to becomes “warrantless general searches by the government” and “clear violation of Fourth Amendment protections,” to say nothing of “the ability to alter the thinking or emotions of large numbers of people” nationally or internationally. The differences between “misguided patriotism” (Putin’s phrase re: hacking our election), “terrorism and political activism…” are thin, aiming “at understanding how to control or prevent public dissent inside the United States through surveillance and manipulation of information flows.” This leans hard on “global security,” propaganda and “tactics to engineer public consent for government policies.” (p. 58, 92, 68, 88-89)
February 11, 2018
I was highly skeptical of this book when it started off talking about facebook selling our data as if this was supposed to be some mind-blowing revelation, but for anyone else starting it and wondering if it's actually worthwhile, yes it does get more in-depth and interesting.
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