You are being watched. Whether through your phone or your car or your credit card, caught on a CCTV camera or tracked through your online viewing history, government agencies know where you are, and are quietly collecting your most intimate, mundane, and personal information. Is this even legal?

Through the examination of 10 crucial legal cases, Habeas Data explores the tools of surveillance that exist today, how they work, and what the implications are for the future of privacy. Farivar discusses the 1960s prosecution of a bookie, which established the “reasonable expectation of privacy” in nonpublic places beyond your home; a 1970s case in which the police monitored a lewd caller — the decision of which is now the linchpin of the NSA’s controversial metadata tracking program revealed by Edward Snowden; and a 2010 low-level burglary trial that revealed police had tracked a defendant’s past 12,898 locations before arrest — an invasion of privacy grossly out of proportion to the alleged crime, which showed how authorities are all too willing to take advantage of the ludicrous gap between the slow pace of legal reform and the rapid transformation of technology. It’s an approach that combines the charge of a legal thriller with the shock of the daily headlines.

Cyrus Farivar is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica and the author of The Internet of Elsewhere:  The Emergent Effects of a Wired World. He is also a radio producer and has reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, The Economist, Wired, The New York Times, and others.

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