Welcome back to the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Byron Tao is here. He is a reporter at notice.

And the author of the new book, Means of Control, how the Hidden Alliance of Tech

and Government is creating a new American surveillance state.

It's a great book.

It's full of eye-opening details about all the data

that's out there, floating off your social media accounts and many of your

apps and even your car tires, and about how the government is buying that data and contracting

with firms to analyze it and just generally finding its way around the Fourth Amendment.

Byron, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I loved your book.

Really engrossing.

Why don't we start with its structure?

I like the way you've organized it.

You proceed chronologically through four generations of data brokers,

consumer data brokers, social data providers,

advertising and location data brokers, and alt data providers.

The overarching feeling that I got as I progressed through this history was of a frog

getting boiled in water, the way that this sort of data and surveillance superstructure gradually

built from things that seem pretty innocuous to something

far more encompassing. So yeah, maybe we could open with you just walking us through that history.

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