Mass surveillance

THE UNBLINKING EYE

“Bulk information overload, that’s my favorite argument in debate,” Lena Grossman tells me in between bites of pizza during a short lunch break after winning a round at the Billy Tate Southern Bell Forum, a highly competitive, invitation-only debate competition held annually in Nashville. She thinks the U.S. government vacuums up more digital data than it knows what to do with — which hinders investigations more than it helps. “The evidence is always going to be better. … It’s just unbeatable,” she says. “People are lazy in research sometimes — but the strategies against this argument just don’t exist.”