They Know Everything About You
How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy
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Descripció de l’editorial
They Know Everything About You is a groundbreaking expos' 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.
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Even readers familiar with Edward Snowden's revelations about the scope of the NSA's gathering of personal information will find that Scheer (The Great American Stickup) powerfully connects the dots of our chilling Orwellian present, one in which privacy is considered a luxury, rather than a right. Scheer limns how in the aftermath of 9/11, "Congress was desperate to be seen throwing money at anything to do with antiterrorism," which resulted in budget increases for NSA programs easing the way for ever-more intrusive government surveillance of U.S. citizens suspected of no crime. That development was facilitated by the rising popularity of websites that encouraged people to surrender more and more privacy to "enhance the consumer experience," giving data to private companies who then shared it with the government. Perhaps the most disturbing section is a scathing look at Facebook's 2012 experiment to manipulate users' moods by skewing content to present mostly positive or mostly negative words. Scheer also notes that reliance on megadata has not served the U.S. defense policy well. He ends with a collective call to action and his argument for what's at stake with the technology of surveillance is starkly clear.
