Data and Goliath Read Online Free PDF

users than it does today. When
     surveillance information was expensive to collect and store, corporations made do
     with as little as possible.
    The cost of computing technology has declined rapidly in recent decades. This has
     been a profoundly good thing. It has become cheaper and easier for people to communicate,
     to publish their thoughts, to access information, and so on. But that same decline
     in price has also brought down the price of surveillance. As computer technologies
     improved, corporations were able to collect more information on everyone they did
     business with. As the cost of data storage became cheaper, they were able to save
     more data and for a longer time. As big data analysis tools became more powerful,
     it became profitable to save more information. This led to the surveillance-based
     business models I’ll talk about in Chapter 4.
    Government surveillance has gone from collecting data on as few people as necessary
     to collecting it on as many as possible. When surveillance was manual and expensive,
     it could only be justified in extreme cases. The warrant process limited police surveillance,
     and resource constraints and the risk of discovery limited national intelligence surveillance.
     Specific individuals were targeted for surveillance, and maximal information was collected
     on them alone. There were also strict minimization rules about not collecting information
     on other people. If the FBI was listening in on a mobster’s phone, for example, the
     listener was supposed to hang up and stop recording if the mobster’s wife or children
     got on the line.
    As technology improved and prices dropped, governments broadened their surveillance.
     The NSA could surveil large groups—the Soviet government, the Chinese diplomatic corps,
     leftist political organizations and activists—not just individuals. Roving wiretaps
     meant that the FBI could eavesdrop on people regardless of the device they used to
     communicate with. Eventually, US agencies could spy on entire populations and save
     the data for years. This dovetailed with a changing threat, and theycontinued espionage against specific governments, while expanding mass surveillance
     of broad populations to look for potentially dangerous individuals. I’ll talk about
     this in Chapter 5.
    The result is that corporate and government surveillance interests have converged.
     Both now want to know everything about everyone. The motivations are different, but
     the methodologies are the same. That is the primary reason for the strong public-private
     security partnership that I’ll talk about in Chapter 6.
    To see what I mean about the cost of surveillance technology, just look how cheaply
     ordinary consumers can obtain sophisticated spy gadgets. On a recent flight, I was
     flipping through an issue of SkyMall , a catalog that airlines stick in the pocket of every domestic airplane seat. It
     offered an $80 pen with a hidden camera and microphone, so I could secretly record
     any meeting I might want evidence about later. I can buy a camera hidden in a clock
     radio for $100, or one disguised to look like a motion sensor alarm unit on a wall.
     I can set either one to record continuously or only when it detects motion. Another
     device allows me to see all the data on someone else’s smartphone—either iPhone or
     Android—assuming I can get my hands on it. “Read text messages even after they’ve
     been deleted. See photos, contacts, call histories, calendar appointments and websites
     visited. Even tap into the phone’s GPS data to find out where it’s been.” Only $120.
    From other retailers I can buy a keyboard logger, or keylogger, to learn what someone
     else types on her computer—assuming I have physical access to it—for under $50. I
     can buy call intercept software to listen in on someone else’s cell phone calls for
     $100. Or I can buy a remote-controlled drone helicopter with an onboard camera and
     use it to