Tracing the Digital Trails We Leave — and Government Follows

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Here’s a cool thing from Medill Journalism School — a Flash presentation showing how your personal data can be used by the federal government or analyzed by intelligence agencies. (Yes, Flash can be annoying, as we’ve been hearing a lot lately; but there are some things, like this, that it can do very well; so give it a whirl.) It reveals how the government uses data mining and what data, from both public records and private data aggregators, is studied, what the privacy rules are and whether they’re followed – and outlines “the digital trails we all leave in our daily lives.”

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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