“What could I learn with this [data]—­theoretically?” Tau asks the former employee. The answer includes a laundry list of possibilities that I suspect would make even the most enthusiastic oversharer uncomfortable. Tau never opts to go down that road, but as Means of Control makes very clear, others certainly have done so and will. At no other point in US history was the government’s appetite for data more voracious than in the days after the attacks, says Tau. It was a hunger that just so happened to coincide with the advent of new technologies, devices, and platforms that excelled at harvesting and serving up personal information that had zero legal privacy protections.