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

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They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy: summary, description and annotation

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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 freedoms 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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Also by Robert Scheer The Great American Stickup How Reagan Republicans and - photo 1

Also by Robert Scheer

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America

Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clintonand How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush

The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (with co-authors Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry)

Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War

America After Nixon: The Age of the Multinationals

How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam

Cuba: An American Tragedy (with co-author Maurice Zeitlin)

Edited by Robert Scheer

The Cosmetic Surgery Revolution

Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches by the Author of Soul on Ice

The Diary of Che Guevara

Copyright 2015 by Robert Scheer Published by Nation Books A Member of the - photo 2

Copyright 2015 by Robert Scheer.

Published by

Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor

New York, NY 10003

Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the Perseus Books Group, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Nation Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 255-1514, or e-mail .

Book design by Linda Mark

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scheer, Robert.

They know everything about you : how data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy / Robert Scheer with Sara Beladi and Joshua Scheer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56858-452-2 (ebook) 1. Privacy, Right ofUnited States. 2. DemocracyUnited States. 3. Data protectionUnited States. 4. Electronic surveillanceUnited States. 5. Intelligence serviceUnited States. 6. National securityUnited States. I. Beladi, Sara. II. Scheer, Joshua. III. Title.

JC596.2.U5S24 2015

323.4480973dc23

2014034638

To my sons:

Christopher, a terrific writer whose polishing of my prose makes me look good and is decent enough not to rub it in;

Joshua, who once again did the heavy lifting research; and

Peter, whose editing of Truthdig frees me to write books.

Contents

F OR DEMOCRACY, PRIVACY IS THE BALL GAME. WITHOUT the assurance of a zone of inviolate space, both physical and mental, that a citizen can inhabit without fear of observation by others, there is no guarantee of the essential sovereignty of the individual promised in the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution. That should be clear, as it is to most people who have been oppressed by the tyranny of authoritarian regimes. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell brilliantly established in their classic writing on this subject, the totality of societal observation over the individual is the defining antithesis of freedom, even when that observation is gained through hidden and subtle persuasion.

That much used to be obvious, particularly after the starkly revealing experiences in the last century with overtly totalitarian regimes; Germany under both fascism and communism offers the most startling example. In both instances, the advanced educational level of the population provided no significant barrier to the populations surrender of freedom and its accommodation of total surveillance of individual activity.

Unfortunately, with the sudden dominance of the Internetwhich has come upon us worldwide and with more crushing, and yes, liberating consequenceswe have been overwhelmed with the illusion that surveillance and freedom are compatible. That is because the culture of the Internet, driven by its core economic model, has succeeded in equating privacy with anonymity. In reality, that is not the case. Privacy is a matter of individual choice as to what to reveal about ones behavior to others, whereas anonymity, in the modern commercialized celebrity-driven world, is assumed to represent a harsh societal dismissal of individual worth.

The profit model of targeted advertising has sustained the Internet since its original development as a Cold Warera military project of the Pentagons science and technology research wing DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) meant to ensure military communications in the event of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That compelling business application of the Internet, the ability of advertisers to anticipate and manipulate consumer consumption, is what has financed the phenomenal growth of the wired world at a pace of change that dwarfs all such transformations in communications that came before. Broadcast television held that distinction previously, with its ability to deliver content to millions of viewersbut it was only a glimpse into our desires that, by the standards of the Internet, was quite limited.

Previous to the Internet, the number of prospective buyers delivered by any conventional mass medium were inefficiently undifferentiated. Experts, with their surveys and ratings, could only speculate as to the demographics of potential customers attracted by a billboard, radio, or TV commercial. These methods were even more imperfect in the all-important estimate of the end goal: how an advertisement resulted in an actual sale that would prove the ads efficacy. The advertising bonanza of the Internet that fuels this communications revolution is based on a far more precise entry point into the mind of the consumer.

Even now in the early phase of mapping our minds, this access to our thoughts already exceeds the powers of the most invasive Big Brother government that Orwell imagined. At the command of Internet-driven signals, people everywhere in the world have been willing to abandon the concerns and safeguards of privacy, developed painstakingly throughout human history, for the convenience of plucking that perfect item off a virtual shelf and paying for it without looking up from their devices. The publics willingness to voluntarilynay, enthusiasticallysacrifice privacy is fueled by a very modern fear of being ignored in a culture where the most observed are the most valued.

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