وسائل السيطرة: كيف يُنشئ التحالف الخفي بين التكنولوجيا والحكومة دولة مراقبة

You are being watched now. This “startling revelation” (The Economist) reveals how the US government has allied with data brokers, technology companies and advertisers to monitor us via the phones we carry and devices in our homes. "A startling... timely... fascinating, and sometimes terrifying, revelation of the decline of privacy in the digital age." - Kirkus Reviews. Nominated for the Sabio Award for Best Business Book. “That evening, I had the opportunity to peer into a hidden world… a whole new kind of surveillance software – software designed to track everyone.” For the past five years—since a chance encounter at a dinner party—journalist Byron Tao has been piecing together a secret story: how the entire Internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism for intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring. Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are vaguely aware of this: Have you ever felt like an ad is "following" you online? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even our car tires to reveal our habits and behavior will astound most citizens. All this monitoring has produced a huge amount of valuable data about each of us. This data is for sale, and the US government is its largest buyer. In the years following September 11, the US government, in collaboration with dozens of unidentified companies spread across the sleepy suburbs of Northern Virginia, built an indoor and outdoor surveillance apparatus of astonishing scope, capable of spying on the lives of almost every person on the planet. This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive: “Get everything you can,” and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors own marketing subsidiaries, and marketing companies own defense contractor subsidiaries. The public knows little about that. Means of Control is a sobering and revealing book, the central story of our dangerous grand bargain – cheap technology is everywhere, but at what cost?