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

by Robert Scheer

Overview

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 freedom's 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781568584539
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	949,261
File size:	846 KB

About the Author

Robert Scheer is the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig, professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and co-host of Left, Right & Center, a weekly syndicated radio show broadcast from NPR's west coast affiliate, KCRW. In the 1960s, he was editor of the groundbreaking Ramparts magazine and later was national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Scheer is the author of nine books, including The Great American Stickup. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Chapter 1 The TED Moment: His Head on a Robot 1

Chapter 2 Cyber Sound Bites 25

Chapter 3 Mad Men Wired 57

Chapter 4 Privacy is Freedom 79

Chapter 5 The Military-Intelligence Complex 103

Chapter 6 A Whistleblower Shall Set Us Free 133

Chapter 7 Foreign Policy: A Tissue of Lies 157

Chapter 8 How the Digital Cookie Crumbles 177

Epilogue 195

Acknowledgments 213

Notes 215

Index 239

Editorial Reviews

01/19/2015
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

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

"...Scheer powerfully connects the dots of our chilling Orwellian present, one in which privacy is considered a luxury, rather than a right." —Publishers Weekly

"A vital piece of work that demands attention." —Kirkus Reviews

“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

“They Know Everything About You is a brilliant book. Robert Scheer, who covered my 1971 trial after I released the Pentagon Papers, has been following privacy and surveillance issues for decades. He is a key voice and his book— cogent, timely, and fascinating—is an indispensable text for our time.” —Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

From the Publisher

03/01/2015
Scheer (journalism, Univ. of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; editor-in-chief, Truthdig; Playing President) analyzes the complicity among corporations and government agencies in the mass online data collection of United States citizens, holding up for particular analysis the implications of the Edward Snowden revelations, and those whistleblowers who were unsuccessful in bringing to light privacy-invasive data collection and storage. Taking as the departure point the notion of the military-industrial complex, Scheer reinterprets this military complex to now encompass Silicon Valley, with the government using corporations' vast stores of private data about nearly everyone online to bring a new kind of military strength to the surveillance of private citizens. VERDICT This work will be suitable for readers interested in security and privacy in the digital era. A timely and accessible account for those who are concerned with the democratic implications of mass Internet surveillance in the United States.—Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Library Journal

2014-12-21
Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Scheer (Communication and Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street, 2010, etc.) examines how online convenience has supplanted bedrock American values of personal freedom and the right to privacy.Have Americans really surrendered liberties for the "freedom" of bypassing the mall and doing their shopping online? Certainly, but as the author discusses at length, the Internet has also given rise to the most perfect surveillance apparatus ever created. For years, Facebook, Google, Amazon and other businesses and organizations have amassed unprecedented amounts of data on anyone who does anything on the Internet. As long as all that personal information was being used to more effectively push products and gizmos on consumers, most everyone over the last 15 years or so just seemed to shrug and keep on surfing. Of course, hawking goods online was never that innocuous—not when the endgame was to not only satisfy desires, but to invent and manufacture them as well. When the Pentagon and the rest of the "Military-Intelligence Complex" started to fiendishly exploit the Web in ever crafty new ways, people finally began to pay more attention and question whether we were entering a scenario initially conceived by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and other prescient writers. "Disturbingly," writes the author, "some of the research [the Pentagon] commissioned seemed to be aimed at understanding how to control or prevent public dissent inside the United States through surveillance and manipulation of information flows, like those curated by social networks." The online giants might have tried to divorce themselves from overreaching government spooks, but Scheer provides more than enough solid journalism to show that the digital dirt is knee-deep and getting deeper. A vital piece of work that demands attention.

Kirkus Reviews