They Know Everything About You

January 19, 2015
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. Agent: Ronald Goldfarb, Goldfarb & Associates.