"The Shadow Factory" by James Bamford

What is surprising is that this book was published in 2008, 5 years before Snowden released documents that basically proved what the author was saying.

Here's the gist without details: NSA was at risk of downsizing, then 9/11 happened, then NSA's budget and authority blew up. Now, the NSA is one of the most well-funded agencies in the world. Now, the NSA tracks everything.

One of the scariest things in this book in 2008 was that the only bottleneck protecting privacy was the NSA's processing power, especially with foreign languages. Nowadays, the NSA is no longer bottlenecked because we have LLMs.

All your data is recorded and now testifies against you. A brave new world! And permissions? No longer required.