Means of Control Quotes

“These two laws have been heralded as landmark efforts by legislatures to bring new privacy rights to consumers in Europe and California. But in reality, any consumer who wants to meaningfully exercise those rights often ends up frustrated. Websites have mastered the art of getting people to click “I accept,” burying a consumer’s right to decline tracking deep in screens that you must click through. And neither law meaningfully allowed even professional reporters from well-resourced media outlets to trace the flow of data through the advertising data ecosystem.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“* Though, of course, numerous investigations in the 1970s did reveal that the U.S. intelligence community had arguably violated the civil liberties of some Americans through surveillance efforts aimed at civil rights protesters and antiwar activists.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“Ultimately, these kinds of special operations man-hunting missions would be revolutionized by one of the greatest cultural shifts of the twenty-first century: a sudden impulse to share everything about your life online.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“The former director of both the CIA and the NSA, Michael Hayden, put it even more bluntly in 2014: “We kill people based on metadata.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“Wyden was giving voice to the growing number of Americans on both the left and the right who had become concerned about government overreach after 9/11. Soon, Wyden told reporters, the Senate would vote on a provision he had authored that he intended to attach to a must-pass spending bill that would force the Defense Department to explain itself in a report to Congress and put a pause to funding for the Total Information Awareness program, all with the aim of giving the public time to understand what exactly the Pentagon was up to.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“It was a fitting place for what Wyden had in mind that morning. The Oregon Democrat had called the press to the Crypt that day not to praise TIA but to bury it.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“In a widely read New York Times column published in November 2002, the conservative journalist William Safire blasted the program as an affront to civil liberties and a dangerous turn toward tyranny. In dire language, Safire warned that such a system would start to ingest every purchase, prescription, magazine subscription, bank deposit—even students’ grades. Safire dubbed it “the supersnoop’s dream”—an “Orwellian scenario” playing out in real time.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“A few days later, a Defense Department lawyer knocked on the official’s door to ask if he had been talking up a commercial data-mining tool for base and facility security purposes. He acknowledged he had. “This is the DOD. We don’t do that shit,” the lawyer said, warning him to knock it off. That legal advice would, in the years to come, go largely unheeded.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

“Dating back to 2019, Premise had a network of more than 1,000 gig workers in the country (Ukraine) that were being asked to do tasks that they believed were innocuous market research or corporate data collection but were actually secret intelligence-gathering projects for American and other Western allied governments.”
― Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State