Someone is watching you. In modern life, we are all tracked and surveilled to a remarkable extent, thanks to the increasingly online world in which we operate. In Means of Control, former Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Tau has set out to explain how we got here (and that it’s much worse than you thought).
After 9/11, government agencies snapped into gear in terms of expanding their range of surveillance. They started keeping tabs on more and more people, monitoring phone calls, bank accounts, and travel histories, trying to spot the next Mohammad Atta before he could do any damage. This meant scanning the lives of a lot of innocent people. But there were still limits (legally and technically) to what they could catch in these information nets.
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