The Decline of Privacy in Today’s Digital World
BOOK REVIEW: MEANS OF CONTROL: How The Hidden Alliance Of Tech And Government Is Creating A New American Surveillance State
By Byron Tau / Crown
Reviewed by: Glenn S. Gerstell
The Reviewer — Cipher Brief Expert Glenn S. Gerstell is a Principal with the Cyber Initiatives Group and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and writes and speaks about the intersection of technology, national security and privacy.
REVIEW — In many ways, what Americans profess to want is exactly what they are unable or unwilling to achieve. Perhaps the best example of this peculiar phenomenon: despite our related aversion to government intrusiveness and desire for privacy, we Americans (alone among industrial democracies) have been unable to adopt basic privacy legislation or even limited regulation of data brokers.
Congress has been struggling with privacy legislation for a decade, and just weeks ago, as part of the recent reauthorization of part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it rejected an amendment barring government purchases of Americans’ information from data brokers.
This perhaps puzzling inability to safeguard the privacy we claim to want is, in journalist Byron Tau’s opinion, largely due to the public’s ignorance about just how little privacy they really have.
In Means of Control (Crown Publishing 2024), Tau, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, spells out in persuasive and disturbing detail how we inescapably create a digital dossier of our every movement, social interactions, purchases, desires and more. Even for a reviewer familiar with intelligence collection, the pervasiveness of data collection described by Tau was overwhelming.
From unencrypted tire pressure sensors that continuously reveal our vehicle’s location, to our cellphones leaking data even when we turn off all sharing and geolocation features, no personal detail is hidden from data brokers amassing information for advertising and other commercial purposes. Tau notes that the “technology embedded in our phones, our computers, our cars, and our homes is part of a vast ecosystem of data collection and analysis primarily aimed at understanding and in some cases manipulating our consumer behavior.”
Governments could use lawful surveillance techniques to capture that data, but “in most cases, there is no need to go to such lengths because the consumer technology we use every day generates an unimaginable amount of data. And much of that data is for sale in opaque marketplaces and digital bazaars where the personal information of billions of consumers is bought, sold, and traded by the petabyte.”
“This torrent of information is transforming government’s relationship to its citizens,” and Tau concedes that “in some cases it’s for the better — public health, city planning, transportation, medicine, and energy efficiency are being altered by insights unleashed using big data.”
But it’s the invasion of privacy and the potential for misuse that most troubles him:
What motivated me to write this book was the sense that the public remains in the dark about the new world of surveillance their government and their business community have been building in tandem. I aim only to lift the veil on the amount of data and power ordinary consumers are handing over every day to people hidden behind a curtain — and to show that there is a high cost to the free digital services they have come to rely on. Secrets in a democracy are corrosive to public trust. In limited circumstances, such as the movement of troops about to deploy overseas or the names of spies, it might be justified to allow governments to keep things from us. But the broad social choices about how much data and power we want our government to amass should be presented to the public for vigorous debate and discussion.
Looking for a way to get ahead of the week in cyber and tech? Sign up for the Cyber Initiatives Group Sunday newsletter to quickly get up to speed on the biggest cyber and tech headlines and be ready for the week ahead. Sign up today.
After 350 interviews and five years of research and writing, Tau produced a well-written and compelling portrait of the extent to which the private sector and governments seemingly know everything about you. Each chapter starts with an often fascinating report about how some app or surveillance technique got started, often without any inkling of its potential intrusiveness – Tau knows how to tell a good story.
The first part of the book looks at the evolution of the consumer data broker industry and the role it played in counterterrorism efforts after 9/11; the second part documents the rise of social media and the government’s nascent attempts to impose some limits; the third section explains how advertising data and smartphones work together to reveal your location; and the final part is a deeper examination of more esoteric and technical data that, in Tau’s view, has “vast consequences for our ability to move around the world without being subjected to persistent surveillance.” He correctly notes that although most of this data is ostensibly anonymized, the reality is that correlation of data sets makes it easy in many cases to assign a specific individual to the data and to reveal movement patterns, lifestyle and more.
Tau takes it as a given that the very existence of all this information and the latent ability to draw conclusions from it is inherently problematic. It’s easy to see how that could be the case, especially in authoritarian states, and even in liberal democracies there’s the potential for abuse. But Tau stays away from the more subjective and difficult question: What really are our privacy expectations in this digital world? Younger generations, at least anecdotally, seem unfazed by sharing personal details that would have been unthinkable to their grandparents. Is the fact that as you enter Walmart your cell phone’s IMSI signal triggers an ad on your phone tied to your online search last week for underwear – creepy? Or helpful? Or a bit of both, but just the price we have to (apparently willingly) pay for a mostly free online experience? And to what extent is our privacy really invaded when potentially illuminating data about our personal lives is just stored in a machine as a series of 0’s and 1’s with no human ever seeing the results? No easy answers here, but Tau doesn’t approach these issues.
Nor does the book live up to its nefarious title: Tau doesn’t explain how, or even if, the American government and commercial sector are indeed “controlling” the average citizen. Obviously, this ocean of data could directly facilitate a surveillance state; some may think we already are close to one, while others disagree. Tau doesn’t explore this further. Indeed, he pins the blame for the public’s ignorance of and indifference to the potential surveillance state on the government itself:
Transparency about [the potential for a surveillance state] is being subordinated to the special and specific needs of a narrow class of intelligence and military professionals….We’ll never know the answer to any of these questions [about the extent of privacy invasions] as long as the needs of intelligence agencies and special operators continue to take precedence over the kind of world that we want our technology to create.
That seems excessive and unnecessarily cynical. To be sure, national security concerns can cloud, if not at times inappropriately preclude, discussions of how our government can and should collect information, but the lack of transparency in this area ultimately has a more benign (but perhaps no less troubling) explanation: The commercial sector built the internet on a business model extracting value from users through advertising revenue and the sale of user data, not fees. It’s simply not in the sector’s interest to have consumers upend that model. You don’t have to look any further than how hard it is to opt out of ads, tracking and the like or how online privacy policies are opaque at best.
But these are more differences of opinion rather than criticisms. Tau’s book is definitely worth reading, and he’s exactly right that our society needs more examination of these issues. Maybe then we’ll get Congress to pass legislation that reflects a considered view of privacy in the digital world.
Means of Control earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Interested in submitting a book review? Send an email to [email protected] with your idea.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
Sign up for the Cyber Initiatives Group newsletter. Better results in cyber require better thinking. Sign up for the CIG newsletter today.