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Her book is a cautionary tale for all of us, with profound implications for our values, our society, and our very selves in a future that will allow us little privacy.

Dragnet Nation is an inside look at who’s watching you, what they know and why it matters. We are being watched, tracked, and cataloged for information recall by corporations and the government.

We see it every day and shrug it off as a part of the new technological age that we seem to accept without argument. It’s done, we are told, for security, our safety, to enhance law enforcement, and other reasons that seem legitimate. The problem is that none of us know exactly how the information gathered is kept, who has access to it, how secure it is from being hacked, and when or if it is eventually erased.

Easton is using license plate scanners to gather information on owners who may have outstanding fines, but what ensures the information gathered on the owners of vehicles not in violation is erased? If a crime is discovered to have occurred two weeks previously, will law enforcement recall the data and every owner of a vehicle within a 5 block radius that day becomes a suspect?

Facebook has admitted to sharing photos posted on their website for the government to add to a data base for a face recognition program. Twitter has provided access to every tweet for the government to retain.

Google remembers our searches and provides ads to us, based on those searches, until it realizes we have moved to a new interest, when it then provides us with new ads.

Smart phones can not only provide your location, but can be activated remotely to listen to your conversations without your knowledge.

Our cars transmit our location, enabling us to know what’s in the neighborhood but also enabling others to track us. And the federal government, we recently learned, has been conducting a massive data-gathering surveillance operation across the Internet and on our phone lines.

Drones are approved for use over the U.S. that can monitor our movements. And it isn’t only the government that can use drones. Corporations and you or your neighbors can use this technology, as well.

In Dragnet Nation, award-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin reports from the front lines of America’s surveillance economy, offering a revelatory and unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data.

In a world where we can be watched in our own homes, where we can no longer keep secrets, and where we can be impersonated, financially manipulated, or even placed in a police lineup, Angwin argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, until we lose the very freedom that makes us unique individuals.

Appalled at such a prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a “burner” phone, showing how difficult it is for an average citizen to resist the dragnets’ reach.

To understand exactly what we face in the future I will be publishing an excerpt from Julia Angwin’s book on Monday. It is an excerpt you need to read in its entirety.