In Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual: Power and Privacy in the Digital Age, Juan D. Lindau explores the political ramifications of our “Brave New Digital World” (xv). Lindau traces the origins of the new digital landscape to the emergence of state-run mass digital surveillance programs that began in the late twentieth century and accelerated after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The perceived need to uncover terrorist threats generated an ever-increasing demand for information that penetrated the private lives of individuals both domestically and abroad. This hunger for information, with its anticipated predictive power to circumvent threats to security, was fed by new digital surveillance techniques and the growth of machine-learning algorithms to help analyze the mountains of new data these techniques supplied. Soon after, corporations advanced these technological developments to mine personal data for profit. Though Lindau addresses the effects of surveillance capitalism as well as the way social media platforms gather personal data to target messages in ways that distort public discourse and grow conspiracy theories, his main focus is state mass surveillance. Lindau attempts to refocus the discussion of digital surveillance and privacy back to state mass surveillance, because states have the ability to destroy civil rights in wa