In the book “Means of Control,” former Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Taul exposes in disturbing detail how private Beltway contractors have grown a secretive surveillance regime, AP technology reporter Frank Bajak writes. In the absence of a federal privacy law, the U.S. national security establishment has being using commercially available data to craft a creeping panopticon that tilts power away from the citizenry. The book describes a shadowy U.S. data collection and brokering industry and how it has been indirectly — and, it seems, legally — eavesdrops on tens of millions of Americans and foreigners in the service of U.S. military, intelligence and homeland security.
