The Government is Watching You – Is It Legal?

Guest: Cyrus Farivar, Senior Tech Policy Reporter, Ars Technica, and Author of “Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech” We’re all talking these days about how Facebook is tracking our every online move and using that data for all sorts of stuff. But what does the government – the NSA, the FBI, your local police department – know about us? US laws have not kept up the new technologies being invented to track us. For example, one of the key legal decisions courts still use to decide if the police cross a line in monitoring someone without a warrant dates back to 1966 and involves a microphone taped to the top of a phone booth. Cyrus Farivar details this huge gap between legal reform and the rapid transformation of surveillance technology in his new book, “Habeas Data: Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Tech.”