The bulk of the book is a tale of Angwin’s journey to reduce her online footprints, to escape the dragnet by minimising tracking of her location, her contacts, and her shopping habits. While there, she shows an administrator in the Stasi archives how easy it is to build a picture of an individual’s social connections using sites such as LinkedIn – far easier than it was for the Stasi.

She travels to Berlin to examine the records of the world’s most pervasive secret police, who had 1 in 4 East Germans working as informants for them. She shows how even the most benign data collection tools, such as the census, were used for ill during both world wars, tracing draft violators and tracking down Japanese Americans. What would once have horrified – a newspaper filled with gay interest ads delivered only to a homosexual reader – is now expected on sites such as Google and Facebook.Īngwin excels at putting this new race for data dominance in historical context. Reviewįifteen years on, we now live in a world where billions of dollars are made off the back of data collected from sites and apps where we read, chat and shop online, and hundreds of thousands of jobs depend on it. And government dragnets rely on obtaining information from the private sector,” she writes. “Government data are the lifeblood of commercial data brokers. In Dragnet Nation, the author, an award-winning investigative journalist, tackles both government and corporate mass surveillance, stressing that they are “deeply intertwined”. Meanwhile, technology companies, reeling from the dotcom crash, turned to data as their hope for more sustainable revenue and profits. government began its mass data collection efforts in earnest after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when traditional surveillance methods failed. Two tectonic shifts that helped create the data-rich Dragnet Nation where we live today both date back to 2001, argues Julia Angwin in her powerful treatise on privacy.

Please do so!īook Review by Cybersecurity Canon Committee Member, Hannah Kuchler : Dragnet Nation (2014) by Julia Angwin Executive Summary We have designed it so that you can directly participate in the process. The Cybersecurity Canon is a real thing for our community. Please write a review and nominate your favorite. We have more than 25 books on the initial candidate list, but we are soliciting help from the cybersecurity community to increase the number to be much more than that. We modeled the Cybersecurity Canon after the Baseball or Rock & Roll Hall-of-Fame, except for cybersecurity books.

Dragnet nation