They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy - Softcover

Scheer, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568585187 ISBN 13: 9781568585185

Publisher: Bold Type Books, 2016

Synopsis

In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Big business has long played a leading role in the hollowing out of personal freedoms. In this new book, Robert Scheer shows how our most intimate habits, from private correspondence, book pages read, and lists of friends and phone conversations have been seamlessly combined in order to create a detailed map of an individual's social and biological DNA. From wiretapping to lax social media security, from domestic spy drones to sophisticated biometrics, both the United States government and private corporate interests have dangerously undermined the delicate balance between national security and individual sovereignty. Without privacy, Scheer argues, there is neither freedom nor democracy. The freedom to be left alone embodies the most basic of human rights. Yet this freedom has been squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience. The information revolution has exposed much of the world's population to a boundless world of universally shared information. But it has also stripped both passive and active participants of their every shred of privacy in ways most don't comprehend. No authoritarian regime ever could have hoped to gain the power to control the power and aspirations of their subjects that today's off-the-shelf information technology already provides. The technology of surveillance, Scheer warns, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.

About this title

Review

Scheer acquits himself as a passionate advocate for privacy rights; you'd want him by your side at a protest. --Los Angeles Times

This is what journalism looks like, provided by one of the greatest reporters of our times. Scheer has written a powerful indictment of the present-day corporate-government surveillance regime that has effectively eliminated the right to privacy. Like a master surgeon, he dissects the self-serving rationales for the wholesale illegal spying on Americans and shows them to be nonsense. --Robert W. McChesney, author of Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century

Robert Scheer reminds us that privacy is everything--the protector of our liberty, the guarantor of our personal autonomy, the fountainhead of our democracy--and yet it's disappearing faster than an electronic blip moving at warp speed from your computer to the NSA. With clarity and precision, Scheer dissects the military-intelligence complex, showing it to be neither very secure nor very intelligent, but, rather, dangerous to us all. --Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley

Book Description

"Scheer reminds us that privacy is everything...and yet it's disappearing faster than an electronic blip moving at warp speed from your computer to the NSA. With clarity and precision, Scheer dissects the military-intelligence complex, showing it to be neither very secure nor very intelligent, but, rather, dangerous to us all." -Robert Reich

About this edition

• Publisher: Bold Type Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1568585187
• ISBN 13: 9781568585185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 271