Technology

Many people generate an immense amounts of digital data during a single day — often without a second thought. But Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, warns that the information generated is being monitored by a group of entrepreneurial mathematicians.

Digital media — including MP3 players, peer-to-peer networks and music websites — are changing how we discover, listen to and share music. Wired.com journalist Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry.

Counterterrorism expert served for 30 years, under several presidents; he joins Dave Davies to discuss what he describes as a culture of mediocrity in U.S. national-security programs.

Jimmy Wales helped create Wikipedia, the interactive online encyclopedia founded in 2001. Users write and edit Wikipedia entries themselves; the site also has a dedicated corps of editors. There are often "edit wars" over entries — some, including the one headlined "2006 Lebanon War," have been edited and then re-edited thousands of times — and Wikipedia's accuracy has been questioned by some professors and colleges, who forbid students to cite it as a source. But Wikipedia, with versions in 250 languages, is one of the top 10 sites on the Internet.

Journalist Julian Dibbell talks about his book Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. He explores the world of online role-playing games, where hundreds of thousands of players log on to operate fantasy characters in virtual environments. One of the most popular games, World of Warcraft, has six million subscribers.

Recent controversies such as Google's business in China and the U.S. government's role in policing eBay transactions have put a spotlight on the intersection between governments and the Internet. Legal scholars Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu address the issue in their new book, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.

Six Feet Under, rest in peace. The HBO series, which aired its final episode Sunday, followed the Fisher family and its funeral home business for five seasons. It received two Golden Globe awards and six Emmys. Alan Ball, creator and executive producer, reflects on his show about death.

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, aruges that rather than turning our brains to mush, entertainment options like video games are so complex that our brains rise to the challenge.

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. For his book, Keefe researched the possibility that the United States has a planet-spanning surveillance network, known as Echelon. Keefe is a third-year student at Yale Law School and was a Marshall scholar and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Robert O'Harrow, Jr. is a reporter for The Washington Post and an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book is about how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies as part of homeland security. Huge data-mining operations are contracted by the government to gather information on our daily lives. Information technology has enabled retailers, marketers, and financial institutions to gather and store data about us.