WASHINGTON, DC—When author Julia Angwin has to post a photo of herself online, she now prefers to use a stencil image of her face in order to avoid detection by facial recognition software. Welcome to her paranoid world of trying to frustrate increasingly sophisticated snoops.

In conducting research for her impressive new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance, the investigative reporter delved deep into the current state of ubiquitous online surveillance and data mining by corporate and government actors. Speaking at the New America Foundation in the nation's capitol on Wednesday afternoon, Angwin described how, in the year leading up to the book’s publication, she decided to internalize the focus of her inquiry. She used her own attempts to “reclaim her privacy” as a case study for the challenges in eluding the digital dragnets.

As any number of articles from the last year may indicate, privacy in a post-Snowden culture is extremely difficult to attain. Angwin’s book describes the current dragnets as “indiscriminate” and “vast in scope,” explaining that the East German secret police, known as the Stasi—described by some as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed—would have been in awe of the National Security Agency’s current capabilities. "The Stasi managed to generate fear with a fraction of the tools we currently have,” she explained in her talk.

But Angwin is no newcomer to the game of tracking the trackers. Prior to undertaking her personal quest to elude the dragnets, she spearheaded the Wall Street Journal’s celebrated “What they Know” series, documenting how cutting edge uses of tracking technologies work and considering what ubiquitous surveillance has meant for consumers and society.

Ground rules

Early in her book, Angwin describes some limits she set for herself. First, as a self-described “technologist,” she would not live like a cave-person. As she later told National Public Radio, “I want all the benefits of the information society—all I was trying to do is mitigate some of the risks.”

Second, she would do nothing that violated the letter of the law. Yet at the talk, she argued that laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) have resulted in what she called a “crisis for journalism.” Angwin described how, under the CFAA, an overzealous prosecutor could consider some of her research for the “What You Know” series criminally actionable. (Many believe that information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide as a result of being prosecuted under this federal law).

Absent those limits, however, her book chronicles some of the drastic (and at times expensive) measures she took in her journey to protect herself. At the talk, she noted that she spent over $2,200 and countless hours trying to evade the dragnets and erase her digital footprint.

Lines of defense

To understand how far Angwin went in her crusade to avoid detection and eliminate her tracks, some of her efforts are listed below. They included:

Wrapping her cell phone first in tinfoil and then in a so-called “Faraday case" that blocks electromagnetic radiation, rendering the phone useless while covered.

Using pre-paid “burner phones” and loading them up with privacy-protective software.

Creating a “fake persona” for herself named Ida Tarbell (an allusion to a well-known early 20th-century American investigative journalist) with her own Amazon and OpenTable accounts, as well as an American Express credit card.

Aggregating a list of 212 data brokers and trying to opt out of their services and remove her information from their lists.

Quitting Google search and Gmail, opting instead for a search engine that keeps no search history record, DuckDuckGo, and a small e-mail service provider, RiseUp.

Keeping her Facebook page but “unfriending” everyone, finding the public display of her “friend” list to be too intrusive.

Deleting her LinkedIn account, which made her feel as if she would never land another job.

Using a secure Web browser called WhiteHat Aviator. It came with built-in HTTPS Everywhere, which does not retain or sell your online activity, and it utilized a service called Disconnect to block trackers.

Using the Tor search engine when wanting highly secure search, noting that it’s slower than other engines because it routes your information around the world.

Purchasing encrypted cloud-storage services for $200.

Purchasing a $35 privacy filter to shield her laptop screen from would-be onlookers; and

Purchasing a $420 subscription to a personal portable Internet service to bypass untrustworthy connections.

Ultimately, however, Angwin concluded that the “choice” to give up one’s privacy is a false one. Even after all of her extreme measures, the author is not sure if she was successful in protecting her privacy. At the talk, Angwin explained, “I would say I probably protected myself at most 50 percent of what is possible. And that’s because I wasn’t willing to live in a cage, in a tin shed in the woods, because I wanted to live in the modern world.”

A better diagnostician than clinician

Angwin’s book provides a good diagnosis of the harms caused by digital surveillance and the futility of trying to protect oneself in the current landscape. She identifies a number of real-life privacy harms she and others have suffered from living under dragnet surveillance, as well as the very real costs and inefficiencies of trying to evade the dragnets.

She also pinpoints many of the sources of the problem, while acknowledging that online privacy protection is a moving target. The book provides ample evidence in support of her claim that "Surveillance dragnets are inherently unfair... they create a culture of fear, in which people like Sharon Gill and Bilal Ahmed are afraid to talk online about their mental issues, in which Yasir Afifi cuts of his friendship with his friend who says dumb things online."

Reflecting on her experiment, Angwin writes, "I wasn't happy with the toll that my countersurveillance techniques had taken on my psyche." She continues, "The more I learned about who was watching me, the more paranoid I became. By the end... I was refusing to have digital conversations with my close friends without encryption. I began using my fake name for increasingly trivial transactions."

Yet, she’s less clear on the prescriptive front.

In describing the world she would like to leave for her children, Angwin prescribes the creation of a Federal "Information Protection Agency" empowered to police the information economy. Angwin hopes that such an Agency would help bring transparency and accountability to data handling and usage. But, she admits that such an agency alone won't be enough of a watchdog to combat government surveillance.

Drawing an analogy to the environmental movement, Angwin further explains her belief that, just like it was not necessary to shut down the industrial economy to rein in pollution, “We don’t need to shut down the data economy." Rather, she writes, "We just need to make the data handlers let us see what they have about us and be accountable for any harm caused by the use of our data.”

While this might be the right compromise, given our continuing environmental woes, the metaphor feels unsatisfying. It also could suggest that, as the United Nation's Climate Panel has concluded with regard to the environment, we are also near the point of no return on the privacy front.

Unlike Angwin, Kevin Bankston, who interviewed the author at Wednesday’s discussion, offered a quick and simple (albeit satirical) solution to the privacy problem.

Bankston played a video from The Onion News Network, in which fake Google employees described how to protect one's privacy online. In the video, the employees explain that once you call Google’s “opt-out team,” you will immediately be escorted in the back of a van to the desolate “22-acre Google opt-out village.” That's where “Web users… are guaranteed an environment free from Google products and natural light from the sun" and "you can just toil in the hinterlands and die young."