While one of the back cover endorsements claims the book is an ‘antidote to Big Brother’s big chill’, I experienced the opposite. She contends that through a lack of privacy people are being routinely hacked in a number of ways, including: always being locatable finding it difficult to keep something secret being impersonated having devices hacked and used to spy on activity using the microphone, camera, and screenshots being categorized, socially sorted and financially manipulated and always being considered a suspect by state agencies and open to suspicionless searches. She herself identified 212 data brokers operating in the US that consolidated and traded data about people, only 92 of which allowed opt-outs (65 of which required handing over additional data to secure the opt-out), and 58 companies that were in the mobile location tracking business, only 11 of which offered opt-outs.

Her analysis draws from of two main sources: her journalism with the Wall Street Journal and interviews with key witnesses, as well as desk-based research of literature and her own attempts to install various bits of software and to change her online and communications behaviour.Īngwin’s argument is that ‘the modern era of dragnets marks a new type of surveillance: suspicionless, computerized, impersonal and vast in scope.’ She reports that in 2013 Krux Digital had identified 328 separate companies tracking visitors to the top fifty content websites.

In short, Julia Angwin charts: (a) how web- and mobile-based communication has become an intersecting set of data dragnets in the United States (and elsewhere), with state agencies and companies using a variety of practices (such as using cookies, data trackers, wifi and MAC address sniffing, spyware) to track and trace the use of phones, apps, websites and online transactions and purchases (b) her attempts to reclaim her privacy and to evade mass surveillance, and to improve her data security, using a range of different tactics, including cloaking, blocking, obfuscation, encryption, requests for copies of her data and deletion from databases, and changing which services she used. The subtitle for Dragnet Nation is ‘A quest for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance,’ which neatly sums up the book’s focus.

Dragnet nation