In The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (2010), Shane Harris explains the modern world of “signals intelligence,” and how it got to be this way.
To summarize the current state of affairs, some arm of the U.S. government probably has the ability to collect all of the electronic data you generate, but even if you are a threat to the nation there is a good chance they won’t know what to do with it.
According to Harris:
…the Watchers have become very good at collecting the dots but not at connecting them.”
If you are a privacy absolutist, then that’s a good thing. But if you’d like to see some return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. government has spent on cutting edge anti-terrorism research, then you have to ask whether we are any safer than we were on September 10, 2001.
Read a review from the NY Times, and an essay adapted from his book in the Wall Street Journal.