Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

“That evening, I was given a glimpse inside a hidden world. . . . An entirely new kind of surveillance program—one designed to track everyone.” Hear a tale of strange bedfellows—the U.S. government, data brokers, tech companies and advertisers—involved in shaping the surveillance state and privacy. 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. Most people are somewhat aware that our modern world is awash in surveillance. But Tau says 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/