Big Brother Technology

The government can hack into any computer or smartphone on the planet. What sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory was exposed as truth with the 2013 NSA leaks from Edward Snowden. Since then, the deluge of CIA and NSA hacking programs filling the sky like rain hasn’t stopped. This is an exposé of the software programs and techniques used by the agencies to spy on the planet. Big Brother is watching. It’s time to watch back. Dozens of previously classified government surveillance programs are divulged in this alarming book! Contents include these fascinating topics: Edward Snowden; NSA; Mass Surveillance; Five Eyes; FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network); Stuxnet; PRISM; MYSTIC; DCSNet (Digital Collection System Network); XKeyscore; DISHFIRE; STONEGHOST; Magic Lantern; ECHELON; Fairview; WikiLeaks; Vault 7; Julian Assange; Room 641A; The Doughnut; Fort Meade; Menwith Hill; Utah Data Center; ICREACH; Ransomware, Tor; “wannacry”; ShadowBrokers; and tons more. Axel Balthazar is at it again!

Based on the series produced for the BBC World Service Who thought up paper money? How did the contraceptive pill change the face of the legal profession? Why was the horse collar as important for human progress as the steam engine? How did the humble spreadsheet turn the world of finance upside-down? The world economy defies comprehension. A continuously-changing system of immense complexity, it offers over ten billion distinct products and services, doubles in size every fifteen years, and links almost every one of the planet's seven billion people. It delivers astonishing luxury to hundreds of millions. It also leaves hundreds of millions behind, puts tremendous strains on the ecosystem, and has an alarming habit of stalling. Nobody is in charge of it. Indeed, no individual understands more than a fraction of what's going on. How can we make sense of this bewildering system on which our lives depend? From the tally-stick to Bitcoin, the canal lock to the jumbo jet, each invention in Tim Harford's fascinating new book has its own curious, surprising and memorable story, a vignette against a grand backdrop. Step by step, readers will start to understand where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going next. Hidden connections will be laid bare: how the barcode undermined family corner shops; why the gramophone widened inequality; how barbed wire shaped America. We'll meet the characters who developed some of these inventions, profited from them, or were ruined by them. We'll trace the economic principles that help to explain their transformative effects. And we'll ask what lessons we can learn to make wise use of future inventions, in a world where the pace of innovation will only accelerate.

In Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True, Mark Dice details actual NSA high-tech spy systems, mind-reading machines, secret government projects, and emerging artificial intelligence programs that seem as if they came right out of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s famous book was first published in 1949, and tells the story of a nightmarish future where citizens have lost all privacy and are continuously monitored by the omniscient Big Brother surveillance system which keeps them obedient to a totalitarian government. The novel is eerily prophetic as many of the fictional systems of surveillance described have now become a reality. Mark Dice shows you the scary documentation that Big Brother is watching you, and is more powerful than you could imagine. - The National Security Agency - Facial Recognition Scanners - Mind Reading Machines - Neural Interfaces - Psychotronic Weapons - Orwellian Government Programs - The Nanny State - Orwellian Weapons - Artificial Intelligence - Cybernetic Organisms - A Closer Look at 1984 - Our Social Structure - The Control of Information - Perpetual State of War - The Personification of the Party - Telescreens - A Snitch Culture - Relationships in Shambles - A Heartless Society - Foreign Countries Painted as Enemies - Power Hungry Officials - An Erosion of the Language - Double Think - And More! By the author of The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction

A collection of essays from historians, linguists, martial artists, and other experts to help you write more compelling fantasy by getting the facts right Whether it's correctly naming the parts of a horse, knowing how lords and ladies address one another, or building a realistic fantasy army, getting the details right takes fantasy writing to the next level. Featuring some of the most popular articles from Dan Koboldt’s Fact in Fantasy blog as well as several never-before-seen essays, this book gives aspiring and established fantasy writers alike an essential foundation to the fascinating history and cultures of our own world, which serve as a jumping-off point for more inspired and convincing fantasy.

Big Data, gathered together and re-analysed, can be used to form endless variations of our persons - so-called ‘data doubles’. Whilst never a precise portrayal of who we are, they unarguably contain glimpses of details about us that, when deployed into various routines (such as management, policing and advertising) can affect us in many ways. How are we to deal with Big Data? When is it beneficial to us? When is it harmful? How might we regulate it? Offering careful and critical analyses, this timely volume aims to broaden well-informed, unprejudiced discourse, focusing on: the tenets of Big Data, the politics of governance and regulation; and Big Data practices, performance and resistance. An interdisciplinary volume, The Politics of Big Data will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and senior researchers interested in fields such as Technology, Politics and Surveillance.

This book shows for the first time how the linking of computers, the use of satellites and the stockpiling of vast amounts of information about individuals is creating a new technological order, and it explores the frightening repercussions.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

A book about what the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows: That surveillance and data privacy is every citizens’ concern An important look at how 50 years of American privacy law is inadequate for the today's surveillance technology, from acclaimed Ars Technica senior business editor Cyrus Farivar. Until the 21st century, most of our activities were private by default, public only through effort; today anything that touches digital space has the potential (and likelihood) to remain somewhere online forever. That means all of the technologies that have made our lives easier, faster, better, and/or more efficient have also simultaneously made it easier to keep an eye on our activities. Or, as we recently learned from reports about Cambridge Analytica, our data might be turned into a propaganda machine against us. In 10 crucial legal cases, Habeas Data explores the tools of surveillance that exist today, how they work, and what the implications are for the future of privacy.