Thom Hartmann

"This book deals with two very large and often amorphous concepts: privacy and surveillance in the context of both government and the marketplace. Both concepts have undergone changes over the millennia of recorded human history, and those changes have dramatically sped up and expanded over the past few centuries, starting with the widespread use of the printing press in the mid- to late-15th century when books and newspapers began to proliferate across Europe and the rest of the "civilized" world by the end of the 17th century. The development of radio, television and the internet in the 20th century heightened the need to define more clearly what both concepts meant and how they applied both to governments (the "public sector") and individual and corporate players (the "private sector"). The Thought Police and Big Brother are terms introduced into the popular lexicon by George Orwell in his novel 1984; Big Brother was the overweening all-powerful government of Orwell's novel, and the Thought Police were those who managed to burrow so deeply into every citizen's behavior, speech and even thoughts that they could control or punish behavior based on the slightest deviations from orthodoxy. Orwell was only slightly off the mark. Big Brother types of government, and Thought Police types of social control, are now widespread in the world and incompatible with democracy, as I'll show in more detail later in the book. Most concerning for Americans and citizens of other "democratic" nations, the mentality of both have heavily infiltrated both American government and corporate sectors, reaching so deeply into the day-to-day details of our lives that the techniques and technologies they use can--and do--not only control, but predict our behavior"--