
They Know Everything About You
How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy
Robert Scheer(Author)
Nation Books (Publisher)
Published on 23. February 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-56858-518-5 (ISBN)
Description
In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore.But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Big business has long played a leading role in the hollowing out of personal freedoms. In this new book, Robert Scheer shows how our most intimate habits, from private correspondence, book pages read, and lists of friends and phone conversations have been seamlessly combined in order to create a detailed map of an individual's social and biological DNA.From wiretapping to lax social media security, from domestic spy drones to sophisticated biometrics, both the United States government and private corporate interests have dangerously undermined the delicate balance between national security and individual sovereignty. Without privacy, Scheer argues, there is neither freedom nor democracy. The freedom to be left alone embodies the most basic of human rights. Yet this freedom has been squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.The information revolution has exposed much of the world's population to a boundless world of universally shared information. But it has also stripped both passive and active participants of their every shred of privacy in ways most don't comprehend. No authoritarian regime ever could have hoped to gain the power to control the power and aspirations of their subjects that today's off-the-shelf information technology already provides. The technology of surveillance, Scheer warns, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Avalon Publishing Group
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
468 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56858-518-5 (9781568585185)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Robert Scheer
They Know Everything About You
How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy
E-Book
02/2015
PublicAffairs
€7.99
Available for download
Person
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 & centre, a weekly syndicated radio show broadcast from NPR's west coast affiliate, KCRW. In the 1960s, he was editor of the ground-breaking 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.