
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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-
Story
Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism. Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.
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Liberal Bias Rife and Unchecked
- By Sam Kopp on 12-18-19
By: Joseph Menn
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Stasiland
- Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
- By: Anna Funder
- Narrated by: Denica Fairman
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Sil A. on 08-11-21
By: Anna Funder
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No Place to Hide
- Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
- By: Glenn Greenwald
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....
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Best Read in Print Format
- By Alfredo Ramirez on 11-22-14
By: Glenn Greenwald
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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing
- The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
- By: Scott J. Shapiro
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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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...
- By Ken Vanden branden on 07-23-23
By: Scott J. Shapiro
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The Arabs
- A History
- By: Eugene Rogan
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 27 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Nostromo on 05-29-16
By: Eugene Rogan
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Surveillance Valley
- The Secret Military History of the Internet
- By: Yasha Levine
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the Internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news - and the device on which you read it.
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Profound look at the internet and surveillance
- By stuartjash on 04-06-18
By: Yasha Levine
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The Ransomware Hunting Team
- A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime
- By: Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden
- Narrated by: BD Wong
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Rob Chavez on 01-18-23
By: Renee Dudley, and others
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From Beirut to Jerusalem
- By: Thomas L. Friedman
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 25 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the most thought-provoking books ever written about the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem remains vital to our understanding of this complex and volatile region of the world. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman drew upon his 10 years of experience reporting from Lebanon and Israel to write this now-classic work of journalism.
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A dated but still relevant take on the Israel/ Palestine conflict
- By Anonymous User on 05-14-24
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Cybersecurity First Principles
- A Reboot of Strategy and Tactics
- By: Rick Howard
- Narrated by: Rick Howard
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Rick Howard, the Chief Security Officer, Chief Analyst, and Senior fellow at The Cyberwire, challenges the conventional wisdom of current cybersecurity best practices, strategy, and tactics and makes the case that the profession needs to get back to first principles.
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Just What I was looking for
- By Roman on 11-17-24
By: Rick Howard
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Project Zero Trust
- A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business
- By: George Finney, John Kindervag - foreword
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In Project Zero Trust: A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business, George Finney, chief security officer at Southern Methodist University, delivers an insightful and practical discussion of Zero Trust implementation. Presented in the form of a fictional narrative involving a breach at a company, the book tracks the actions of the company's new IT security director. Listeners will learn John Kindervag's 5-Step methodology for implementing Zero Trust, the four Zero Trust design principles, and how to limit the impact of a breach.
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This one will be a classic
- By Jordan on 10-16-22
By: George Finney, and others
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Backfired: Attention Deficit
- By: Leon Neyfakh, Prologue Projects
- Narrated by: Leon Neyfakh, Arielle Pardes
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Original Recording
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ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10 percent of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the US. In the second installment of Backfired, cohosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.
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Avoid if recently diagnosed with ADHD as an Adult
- By Anonymous User on 10-05-24
By: Leon Neyfakh, and others
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2034
- A Novel of the Next World War
- By: Elliot Ackerman, Admiral James Stavridis USN
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, P.J. Ochlan, Vikas Adam, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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From two former military officers and award-winning authors comes a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 - and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.
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Meh....
- By Ronald A McBroom-Teasley on 03-10-21
By: Elliot Ackerman, and others
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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
- Unabridged
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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
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Future Crimes
- Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
- By: Marc Goodman
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Marc Goodman
- Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims’ every move. We all know today’s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that’s just the beginning.
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The book for all of us to help protect us
- By Sandeep on 10-12-15
By: Marc Goodman
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.
You sort of knew it already…
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Wow. This book opened my eyes
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A must read for all Americans
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Eye opening
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Up to date in an information tsunami world
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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.
Devious but necessary means?
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WTF…..
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A must read
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Eye Opener
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Strange things are happening and stranger things are coming. Tao offers us a first line of defence
Knowledge is the anti-conspiracy weapon
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