Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State Byron Tau CROWN, 2024 Midway through his book, Tau, an investigative journalist, recalls meeting with a disgruntled former employee of a data broker—a shady company that collects, bundles, and sells your personal data to other (often shadier) third parties, including the government. This ex-employee had managed to make off with several gigabytes of location data representing the precise movements of tens of thousands of people over the course of a few weeks. “What could I learn with this [data]—­theoretically?” Tau asks the former employee. The answer includes a laundry list of possibilities that I suspect would make even the most enthusiastic oversharer uncomfortable. “If information is power, and America is a society that’s still interested in the guarantee of liberty, personal dignity, and the individual freedom of its citizens, a serious conversation is needed.” Bryon Tau, author of Means of Control Did someone in this group recently visit an abortion clinic? That would be easy to figure out, says the ex-employee. Anyone attend an AA meeting or check into inpatient drug rehab? Again, pretty simple to discern. Is someone being treated for erectile dysfunction at a sexual health clinic? If so, that would probably be gleanable from the data too. Tau never opts to go down that road, but as Means of Control makes very clear, others certainly have done so and will. While most of us are at least vaguely aware that our phones and apps are a vector for data collection and tracking, both the way in which this is accomplished and the extent to which it happens often remain murky. Purposely so, argues Tau. In fact, one of the great myths Means of Control takes aim at is the very idea that what we do with our devices can ever truly be anonymized. Each of us has habits and routines that are completely unique, he says, and if an advertiser knows you only as an alphanumeric string provided by your phone as you move about the world, and not by your real name, that still offers you virtually no real privacy protection. (You’ll perhaps not be surprised to learn that such “anonymized ad IDs” are relatively easy to crack.) “I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location, or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there’s a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to,” writes Tau. Unraveling the story of how these strangers—everyone from government intelligence agents and local law enforcement officers to private investigators and employees of ad tech companies—gained access to our personal information is the ambitious task Tau sets for himself, and he begins where you might expect: the immediate aftermath of 9/11. At no other point in US history was the government’s appetite for data more voracious than in the days after the attacks, says Tau. It was a hunger that just so happened to coincide with the advent of new technologies, devices, and platforms that excelled at harvesting and serving up personal information that had zero legal privacy protections.