No Place to Hide

In "No Place to Hide," award-winning "Washington Post" reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., lays out in unnerving detail the post-9/11 marriage of private data and technology companies and government anti-terror initiatives to create something entirely new: a security-industrial complex. Drawing on his years of investigation, O'Harrow shows how the government now depends on burgeoning private reservoirs of information about almost every aspect of our lives to promote homeland security and fight the war on terror. Consider the following: When you use your cell phone, the phone company knows where you are and when. If you use a discount card, your grocery and prescription purchases are recorded, profiled, and analyzed. Many new cars have built-in devices that enable companies to track from afar details about your movements. Software and information companies can even generate graphical link-analysis charts illustrating exactly how each person in a room is related to every other -- through jobs, roommates, family, and the like. Almost anyone can buy a dossier on you, including almost everything it takes to commit identity theft, for less than fifty dollars. It may sound like science fiction, but it's the routine activity of the nation's fast-growing information industry and, more and more, its new partner the U.S. government. With unrivaled access, O'Harrow tells the inside stories of key players in this new world, from software inventors to counterintelligence officials. He reveals how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies. And he examines the impact of this new security system on our traditional notions of civil liberties, autonomy, and privacy, and the ways it threatens to undermine some of our society's most cherished values, even while offering us a sense of security. This eye-opening examination takes readers behind the walls of secrecy and shows how we are rushing toward a surveillance society with few rules to guide and protect us. In this new world of high-tech domestic intelligence, there is literally no place to hide.

Review :
"Kirkus Reviews"From Starbucks to the subway to the sidewalk, you are being watched....O'Harrow voices a clear concern over the ethics of such snooping...persuasively delineating how that information is abused and how unavoidable mistakes have profound consequences. A skillful chart of a surveillance society out of control. Jeffrey Rosen, author of "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age"The question of how to preserve privacy and security after 9/11 is one of America's most urgent challenges, and Robert O'Harrow, Jr., is one of America's most gifted reporters on the rise of the surveillance society. In this gripping narrative, he helps to explain the stories behind technologies of data mining and identification that should help every citizen understand their promises and dangers. Richard A. Clarke, author of "Against All Enemies""No Place to Hide" exposes the real tensions between our new technologies that make us more secure and our traditions of civil liberties and privacy. This is not a book about theory; O'Harrow introduces us to the real players and programs that are tracking us all. Bob Barr, former member of Congress and privacy expertWhat has not been done until now, and which Robert O'Harrow, Jr., has accomplished brilliantly, is to paint a comprehensive picture of just how much information has been, is being, and will be gathered on each one of us through the surveillance tools now available to government and business alike. The picture he presents truly is a frightening one. It may hurt to look at it, but if we do not, we will surely have no hope of ever controlling or limiting it.