
Means of Control
How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State
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Narrated by:
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Sean Patrick Hopkins
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By:
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Byron Tau
About this listen
You are being surveilled right now. This sweeping exposé reveals how the U.S. government allied with data brokers, tech companies, and advertisers to monitor us through the phones we carry and the devices in our home.
“A revealing . . . startling . . . timely . . . fascinating, sometimes terrifying examination of the decline of privacy in the digital age.”—Kirkus Reviews
“That evening, I was given a glimpse inside a hidden world. . . . An entirely new kind of surveillance program—one designed to track everyone.”
For the past five years—ever since a chance encounter at a dinner party—journalist Byron Tau has been piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring.
Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this: Ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even the tires underneath our cars to reveal our habits and behavior would astonish most citizens. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of valuable data about every one of us. That data is for sale—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.
In the years after 9/11, the U.S. government, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, built a foreign and domestic surveillance apparatus of breathtaking scope—one that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive—“get everything you can”—and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. And the public knows virtually nothing about it.
Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is the defining story of our dangerous grand bargain—ubiquitous cheap technology, but at what price?
*Includes a downloadable PDF of resources and key concepts & definitions from the book
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Byron Tau (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“[Tau] documents how, across more than two decades, our government has turned to the private sector to keep tabs on us, all while both the authorities and the companies involved do everything they can to keep Americans in the dark. . . . An in-depth account . . . Tau’s extensive research gives readers a detailed tour of the bafflingly complex ecosystem of brokers and buyers of [our] information.”—Reason
“Byron Tau has revealed the secret history of a new American surveillance state. We are all its unwitting builders, providing the raw materials from the phones we carry in our pockets and the devices we place in our homes. As Tau shows in vivid, often frightening detail, none of us consented to this arrangement. But we can hardly be surprised that corporations and governments have scooped up unfathomable amounts of information about us, since it was practically free for the taking. Means of Control is an urgent story, meticulously reported and compellingly told. . . . A testament to the singular and indispensable power of journalism to shine light in the dark and find answers to the hardest questions.”—Shane Harris, author of The Watchers
“Byron Tau’s extraordinary book recounts in engrossing detail how the U.S. government exploits massive loopholes in U.S. surveillance law to purchase in vast digital bazaars the intimate personal data that Americans unwittingly spew from their phones, cars, and computers every minute of every day. Means of Control exposes how American surveillance capitalism breeds secret government surveillance on a scale never imagined.”—Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
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- How to MindF**k a Man into Spending, Spoiling, and Sponsoring
- By: G. L. Lambert
- Narrated by: Patrick Stevens
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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I have discovered a group of women who refuse to be exploited, are immune to manipulation, and who never settle in the name of love. These ladies know what they want and take what they want by beating men at their own game. Utilizing the secrets exposed in this book, these women gain power, money, and status. Men call them gold diggers, women call them hos, but they call themselves winners. This is the book that society doesn't want you to listen to….
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I spent $24,000 in 4 months
- By B.M. on 10-06-18
By: G. L. Lambert
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Medieval Myths & Mysteries
- By: Dorsey Armstrong, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Dorsey Armstrong
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Original Recording
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The 10 enlightening (and often humorous) lectures of Medieval Myths and Mysteries will show you how far from the “dark” times of legend these centuries were. Uncover the facts about the Knights Templar. Reveal the truth behind the tales of legendary creatures like the Questing Beast and the unicorn. Trace the events of the Black Death and the ways it altered the world in its wake, and much more. With Professor Armstrong, you will dig deep into the ways that later generations reshaped the narrative of the medieval years and perpetuated the myths.
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Interesting, but centered on Britain
- By Ximena on 04-10-20
By: Dorsey Armstrong, and others
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The Man Who Killed Kennedy
- The Case Against LBJ
- By: Roger Stone
- Narrated by: David Rapkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of great ambition and enormous greed, both of which, in 1963, would threaten to destroy him. In the end, President Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas and from the underworld and from the government to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. President Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In The Man Who Killed Kennedy, you will find out how and why he did it. Political consultant, strategist, and Libertarian Roger Stone has gathered documents and used his firsthand knowledge to construct the ultimate tome to prove that LBJ was not only involved in JFK's assassination, but was in fact the mastermind. With 2013 being the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's assassination, this is the perfect time for The Man Who Killed Kennedy to be available to readers. The research and information in this book is unprecedented, and as Roger Stone lived through it, he's the perfect person to bring it to everyone's attention.
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COMPELLING BOOK - THE CROOKS ARE IN POWER
- By Theo Tsourdalakis on 12-01-13
By: Roger Stone
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My Big TOE: Awakening
- Book One of a Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics
- By: Thomas Campbell
- Narrated by: Thomas Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.
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What a Trip (but to where?)
- By Michael on 11-26-13
By: Thomas Campbell
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Mythology: Mega Collection
- Classic Stories from the Greek, Celtic, Norse, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese, Mesopotamian and Egyptian Mythology
- By: Scott Lewis
- Narrated by: Madison Niederhauser, Oliver Hunt
- Length: 31 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you know how many wives Zeus had? Or how the famous Trojan War was caused by one beautiful lady? Or how Thor got his hammer? Give your imagination a real treat. This Mega Mythology Collection of eight audiobooks is for you....
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An interesting set of introductions.
- By Kevin Potter on 05-30-19
By: Scott Lewis
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Caffeine
- How Caffeine Created the Modern World
- By: Michael Pollan
- Narrated by: Michael Pollan
- Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
- Original Recording
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Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.
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Leaves much to be desired
- By Melody H on 02-02-20
By: Michael Pollan
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The Complete Book of Five Rings
- By: Miyamoto Musashi, Kenji Tokitsu - editor/translator
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Complete Book of Five Rings is an authoritative version of Musashi's classic The Book of Five Rings, translated and annotated by a modern martial arts master, Kenji Tokitsu. Tokitsu has spent most of his life researching the legendary samurai swordsman and his works, and in this book he illuminates this seminal text, along with several other works by Musashi.
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Best translation I have encountered.
- By DW on 05-27-16
By: Miyamoto Musashi, and others
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mix of information and propaganda
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The excellent prose
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Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity veteran Justin Hutchens delivers an incisive and penetrating look at how contemporary and future AI can and will be weaponized for malicious and adversarial purposes. In the book, you will explore the history of social engineering and social robotics, the psychology of deception, considerations of machine sentience and consciousness, and the history of how technology has been weaponized in the past.
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Overall, pretty disappointed
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
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Book Editors failed to trim the word count
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Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud's Pegasus: How a Spy in Our Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy is the story of the one of the most sophisticated and invasive surveillance weapons ever created, used by governments around the world.
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Incredible!
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The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents - Bush and Obama - drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal.
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mix of information and propaganda
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In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”
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A Great Achievement
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Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.
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The excellent prose
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Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity veteran Justin Hutchens delivers an incisive and penetrating look at how contemporary and future AI can and will be weaponized for malicious and adversarial purposes. In the book, you will explore the history of social engineering and social robotics, the psychology of deception, considerations of machine sentience and consciousness, and the history of how technology has been weaponized in the past.
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Overall, pretty disappointed
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Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.
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It’s a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society.
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I can't seem to like this book...
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Rinsed
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Money laundering has been around for centuries. For as long as people have been stealing money, there's been an industry ready to wash it. But recent tech innovations have created vastly complex new systems for laundering that threaten to overwhelm authorities, destabilise economies and disrupt societies. Ranging from the flamboyant luxury of Dubai hotels to quiet coastal Ireland, from the UK to Nigeria and from Indonesia to North Korea, Rinsed is a truly global relevatory investigation into the new army of innovative launderers ... and the consequences for all of us.
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Almost but not quite plagiarism
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Governments and hundreds of corporations are spying on you and everyone you know. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide for you. Even when you've explicitly asked them not to. Reclaiming privacy is the only way we can regain control of our lives and our societies. These governments and corporations have too much power, and their power stems from us - from our data. Privacy is as collective as it is personal, and it's time to take back control.
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Like it or not, your every move is being watched and analyzed. Consumers' identities are being stolen, and a person's every step is being tracked and stored. What once might have been dismissed as paranoia is now a hard truth, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility".
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Limited value for the average person
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Battlefield Cyber
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The United States is being bombarded with cyber-attacks. From the surge in ransomware groups targeting critical infrastructure to nation states compromising the software supply chain and corporate email servers, malicious cyber activities have reached an all-time high. Russia attracts the most attention, but China is vastly more sophisticated. They have a common interest in exploiting the openness of the Internet and social media—and our democracy—to erode confidence in our institutions and to exacerbate our societal rifts to prevent us from mounting an effective response.
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Lack case studies on Russian threats and attacks.
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Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money.
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Could not put this down
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The Arabs
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In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.
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Superb Book About the Arab World
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The Ransomware Hunting Team
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Scattered across the world, an elite team of code crackers is working tirelessly to thwart the defining cyber scourge of our time. You’ve probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, or simply cherish your digital data, you may be painfully familiar with the team’s sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, an unlikely band of misfits, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the underworld of hackers who lock computer networks and demand huge payments in return for the keys.
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Ok Book but Lacks Cohesive Story
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By: Renee Dudley, and others
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Countdown to Zero Day
- Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
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The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction—in this case, on an Iranian nuclear facility.
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Amazingly detailed, sober and above all, damning
- By Greg on 11-22-14
By: Kim Zetter
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Surveillance State
- Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
- By: Josh Chin, Liza Lin
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
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Performance
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Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated harnessing of data. It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As a minority separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI.
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Excellent
- By DeeRod on 05-26-23
By: Josh Chin, and others
What listeners say about Means of Control
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- Leigh Munsil
- 05-08-24
You sort of knew it already…
But this well-reported, well-told story of the data collection capacity of the seemingly innocuous devices all around us, combined with just how easily it can be used for surveillance by governments, bad actors or just the highest bidder is chilling.
A riveting narrative with several sections that had me on the edge of my seat or gritting my teeth in frustration. Good audiobook narration, too, a really engaging voice and presentation.
I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
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- Austin Frangoules
- 06-04-24
Wow. This book opened my eyes
I couldn’t be more thankful to have been recommended this book. I had no idea about anything of this nature and so glad my eyes are now open. Please, keep up what you’re doing and write more!
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- Renee Miranda
- 09-01-24
A must read for all Americans
Wake up America! Before it is too late to wake up. This books barely touches what is in reality happening behind the scenes, it just recounts what we were allowed to know.
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- Armando
- 01-05-25
Eye opening
Your data is not secure. This book is eye opening to say the least. Made me order another book he spoke about to decrease online footprint.
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- Stephen Mayes
- 03-12-24
Knowledge is the anti-conspiracy weapon
Byron Tau picks up where Shoshana Zuboff's "Sureveillance Capitalism" leaves off. With a dizzying fountain of richly researched studies Tau demonstrates the history and current mechanisms of electronic surveillance, and describes the applications and consequences of our ignorant but willing complicity in the system. "Means Of Control" concludes with a number of practical tips to help the unwary, and if there's one bottom line takeaway it is that middle class law abiding citizens are now fully in the cross hairs. As Zuboff has pointed out, if it's free we are not the product - we are the raw material. We are all grist to the mill, ground up, mulched and then buried in our own "exhaust".
Strange things are happening and stranger things are coming. Tao offers us a first line of defence
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- Mark A Vega
- 04-23-24
Up to date in an information tsunami world
Accurate, timely and insightful. I bought the hardback after finishing the book in my old school effort to make permanent the knowledge and information shared in this work. From page 1 to the invaluable appendix, the book confirms that the issue of Privacy awareness is as important as TAKING ACTION TO UNDERSTAND, MONITOR AND MANAGE YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT. For you and your family, employees and neighbors. The Means of Control are literally in your hands.
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- mp
- 10-06-24
Devious but necessary means?
An eye-opening listen.
The author did some pretty good digging for this book, which for the most part was even keeled, however, he couldn’t resist a little political view.
Not bad enough to throw out though.
The performance was good but the style and cadence became annoying after a while and didn’t seem “serious” enough given the subject matter.
Still, it is a worthy listen.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-07-24
WTF…..
Extremely informative, highlight the sneakiness in how technology companies and government interact. Book give some good recommendations on protecting ones privacy online. It’s scary how we are allowing all of this to go on behind-the-scenes. This brings to the surface those hidden tactics.
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- Ivan
- 04-10-24
A must read
This book provides a great overview of data collection, from: what data are collected, to how collection is done, to how information in data is used (and was used) in recent world events. I’m glad author stayed at a high enough level so anyone will find book interesting. I really enjoyed listening to it.
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- Zoe Luepke
- 09-02-24
Eye Opener
Absolutely eye opening and highly informative. it confirms suspicions I had while doing my own research, this book is absolutely a must read.
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