Means of Control

A sweeping exposé of the U.S. government’s alliance with data brokers, tech companies, and advertisers, and how their efforts are reshaping surveillance and privacy as we know it Our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this—ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet?—but we don’t understand the extent to which the technology embedded in our phones, computers, cars, and homes is part of a vast ecosystem of data collection. Our public spaces are blanketed by cameras put up in the name of security. And pretty much everything that emits a wireless signal of any kind—routers, televisions, Bluetooth devices, chip-enabled credit cards, even the tires of every car manufactured since the mid-2000s—can be and often is covertly monitored. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of data about every citizen—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government. Reporter Byron Tau has been digging deep inside the growing alli