“Spying is thriving” because little is understood about how pervasive it is.

So writes Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School, in her new book, American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What to Do About It. Modern technology makes spying easy, modern business models encourage trading personal information for cool features, and federal agencies have broad approval—and little resistance—to collect nearly as much information on people as possible.

Granick’s book raises the questions: In the post-9/11, post-Snowden world, how much government surveillance is too much? What lines should be drawn, if any, to protect the rights of private citizens?

“We need a comprehensive public investigation into what American spies are doing in our name, and we need far stronger regulation of surveillance activities to protect innocent people’s privacy and to guard against abuses of sensitive, personal data,” she says in her book’s introduction.

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Granick and I spoke last week about surveillance, law, terrorism, and government, the intersection of which she documents in her book, which has already won the Palmer Prize for scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: Your book is remarkably comprehensive and up-to-date, except for Trump.

I’m glad, actually, that Trump wasn’t president—and that I had no inkling that he would be president—when I wrote it, because my point isn’t to say, “Look how dangerous these tools are in the hands of a dangerous person.”

My point was more: “This system we’ve set up is inadequate to protect us from even well-meaning people. Surveillance is dangerous. It’s been misused by presidents, good and bad, throughout the ages. We need to look at the system and not at the person.”

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