THINGS THAT DON'T WANT TO BE FOUND

THINGS THAT DON’T WANT TO BE FOUND is the fascinating and startling account of the alliance between business, tech, and the government in the latter’s roughly 20-year pursuit of “total information awareness” – turning the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world into a giant sensor of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring. 

The story of the book focuses on how the government came to view commercial data – one source refers to it in the proposal as “the largest information gathering enterprise ever conceived by man. And it wasn't built by the government.” – as a principal asset of national security for the 21^st Century, and pursued it with abandon by working with scores of relatively anonymous companies scattered across the Northern Virginia suburbs to build a foreign and domestic surveillance capacity of breathtaking depth, pervasiveness, and access into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. 

What has resulted is something akin to a Military-Information or Commercial-Intelligence complex, a Strangelove Silicon Valley of modern day arms dealers – a cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats with one directive: get everything you can; and an occasionally darkly humorous world in which, as Byron puts it, “defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries, and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries.”

The book is filled with incredible characters, stories, moments, and unique settings that stitch together a vast and sprawling history into our era’s defining story of government and business; of the public use of private lives; of intelligence and technology; and of life, death, and profiteering on the knife edge of national security.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Byron Tau is a reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington, D.C. bureau, where he covers the Justice Department and the FBI. Prior to joining the newspaper, Mr. Tau was a reporter at Politico where he covered the White House, lobbying, campaign finance and politics.