Means of Control, book talk and discussion with Byron Tau

The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) at the University of Salford welcomes Byron Tau (Investigative Reporter at The Associated Press) for this online talk on his recent book Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

For the past five years—ever since a chance encounter at a dinner party—journalist Byron Tau has been piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring.

Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this: Ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even the tires underneath our cars to reveal our habits and behavior would astonish most citizens. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of valuable data about every one of us. That data is for sale—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.

In the years after 9/11, the U.S. government, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, built a foreign and domestic surveillance apparatus of breathtaking scope—one that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive—“get everything you can”—and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. And the public knows virtually nothing about it.

Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is the defining story of our dangerous grand bargain—ubiquitous cheap technology, but at what price?

Byron Tau is a veteran Washington, D.C.-based investigative and enterprise journalist who specializes in law, courts, national security. He's also interested in covering issues involving privacy, technology, digital security, government transparency, cybersecurity and surveillance. With over 15 years of experience in Washington, Byron has covered numerous beats across all three branches of the federal government.

He started his career at Politico where he wrote about national politics, the White House, the 2012 presidential campaign, and led the publication's coverage of lobbying and campaign finance issues. In 2014, he joined the Wall Street Journal as a White House correspondent. He would go on to cover Congress, the Justice Department and the federal courts for the newspaper, with a focus on stories about accountability and government investigations. He was a part of the Journal's team providing in-depth coverage of the Hillary Clinton classified emails investigation, the congressional and special counsel probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election, congressional oversight of Donald Trump culminating in two impeachments, the sprawling array of January 6th cases and much more. He also helped launch NOTUS, a nonprofit newsroom in Washington D.C.

He now works as an investigative reporter at the Associated Press and lectures in the undergraduate journalism program at Georgetown. His book, Means of Control, was published in Feb. 2024.