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

By Robert Scheer

They comprehend every little thing approximately You is a groundbreaking exposé of ways executive organisations and tech enterprises video display nearly each point of our lives, and a fierce security of privateness and democracy.

The revelation that the govt. has entry to an enormous trove of non-public on-line info demonstrates that we already stay in a surveillance society. however the erosion of privateness rights extends a long way past large govt. Intelligence organisations similar to the NSA and CIA are utilizing Silicon Valley company companions as their facts spies. probably revolutionary tech businesses are becoming a member of forces with snooping govt businesses to create a courageous new global of stressed tyranny.

Life within the electronic age poses an remarkable problem to our constitutional liberties, which warrantly a wall of privateness among the person and the govt. the fundamental assumption of democracy calls for the power of the person to scan with rules and institutions inside of a secure region, as secured by way of the structure. The unobserved second embodies the main simple of human rights, but it truly is being squandered within the identify of nationwide protection and patron convenience.

Robert Scheer argues that the data revolution, whereas a resource of public enlightenment, comprises the seeds of freedom’s destruction within the type of a surveillance kingdom that exceeds the wildest dream of the main creative dictator. The know-how of surveillance, until vigorously resisted, represents an existential possibility to the liberation of the human spirit.

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The ease of getting the Brits act as surrogate press-basher used to be famous via NSA leaders in files that got here to be published based on a Freedom of data Act (FOIA) request made via the linked Press in July 2014. The workplace of nationwide protection director James Clapper denied that one of these messages existed and had past blocked an analogous request, yet emails have been ultimately produced that contained revealing snippets. “Good information, no less than in this front,” wrote Richard H. Ledgett, chief of the NSA job strength responding to the Snowden leaks, in an e mail to the agency’s director, common Keith B. Alexander. the e-mail used to be titled “Guardian facts being destroyed” and was once despatched sooner than the challenging drives have been floor to bits. Clapper was once additionally at the e mail chain and replied, “Appreciate the dialog this present day. ”5 In reaction, a spokesperson for the dad or mum acknowledged, “What’s possibly so much referring to is that the disclosure of those emails seems to be to contradict the White House’s reviews approximately these occasions final yr, once they puzzled the appropriateness of the U. okay. government’s intervention. ”6 The records that have been eventually published have been seriously redacted, with even key items of the metadata within the headings obscured. The reliable security of blacking out a lot of the fabric, given through an management whose president had promised transparency, was once the will to guard the privateness of presidency officials—a bizarrely ironic drawback for a central authority that were uncovered as invading the privateness of billions of individuals around the globe. As Glenn Greenwald said at the importance of the hot details: no less than as remarkable as what the Obama management disclosed according to AP’s FOIA request is what they suppressed. examine the files the management produced: almost it all censored, although it relates to discussions via public officers of the U. okay. government’s assault at the Guardian’s information accumulating technique. we're authorised to work out simply the smallest snippets; almost every little thing during this e-mail chain is hid, once more creating a entire farce not just out of FOIA but in addition Obama’s self-glorifying declare that he presides over the main obvious management Ever. additionally keep in mind how now we have continually heard from humans like Senator Dianne Feinstein or even the president himself that once the govt. collects “only metadata” that doesn't even represent genuine spying (it “is no longer surveillance,” Feinstein wrote; “we don’t have a household spying program,” proclaimed Obama). but right here the management is concealing not just nearly all of its personal e mail content material but in addition titanic parts of the metadata of these emails. In justifying its concealments, the management has the audacity to assert the disclosure “would represent a basically unwarranted invasion of privateness. ” So the Obama management is seemingly able to spotting how invasive metadata may be in terms of its personal. therefore we're not accredited to grasp which of our public officers participated during this little party over British assaults on press freedom, not to mention what they acknowledged.

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