Government Surveillance, Cutting through the Hype: Medical Myths

The Government is Watching You – Is It Legal? Guest: Cyrus Farivar, Senior Tech Policy Reporter, Ars Technica, and Author of “Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech” We’re all talking these days about how Facebook is tracking our every online move and using that data for all sorts of stuff. But what does the government – the NSA, the FBI, your local police department – know about us? US laws have not kept up the new technologies being invented to track us. For example, one of the key legal decisions courts still use to decide if the police cross a line in monitoring someone without a warrant dates back to 1966 and involves a microphone taped to the top of a phone booth. Cyrus Farivar details this huge gap between legal reform and the rapid transformation of surveillance technology in his new book, “Habeas Data: Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Tech.”  Hype: What’s Real and What’s Not in Medicine Guest: Nina Shapiro, MD, Pediatric Ear, Nose and Throat Surgeon, and Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, and Author of "Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims and Bad Advice--How to Tell What's Real and What's Not" When you hear about some new disease, treatment, promised cure or health trend, what do you do next? Google it? And then it’s a matter of sifting through the flood of information online. Definitive answers are hard to come by. Is buying organic always better for you? Do detoxes work? Does sugar feed cancer cells? Which diet is scientifically proven to bring weight loss? Do I really need to drink 8 glasses of water a day? Is taking vitamins necessary for good health? Can face creams really reverse aging? UCLA Pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon Nina Shapiro says even doctors like herself fall for hype sometimes. So she’s written a book to help us sort out what’s real and what’s no. It's called “Hype.”