‘Nightmare Use for Data’: Why the Government Is Buying Your Info
‘Nightmare Use for Data’: Why the Government Is Buying Your InfoThe freakout moment that set journalist Byron Tau on a five-year quest to expose the sprawling U.S. data surveillance state occurred over a “wine-soaked dinner” back in 2018 with a source he cannot name. The tipster told Tau the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies. In his new book, Means of Control, Tau details everything he’s learned since that dinner: An opaque network of government contractors is peddling troves of data, a legal but shadowy use of American citizens’ information that troubles even some of…