Our Spotlight illuminates the shadows
With the expiration and immediate reinstatement of NSA surveillance powers, surveillance and privacy (or at least the politics surrounding them) have dominated the news lately. This month we bring you three books dissecting the now-global corporate/government surveillance state…
They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracyby Robert Scheer
They Know Everything About You is a groundbreaking exposé of how government agencies and tech corporations monitor virtually every aspect of our lives, and a fierce defense of privacy and democracy. The revelation that the government has access to a vast trove of personal online data demonstrates that we already live in a surveillance society. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA are using Silicon Valley corporate partners as their data spies. Seemingly progressive tech companies are joining forces with snooping government agencies to create a brave new world of wired tyranny.
Life in the digital age poses an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional liberties, which guarantee a wall of privacy between the individual and the government. The basic assumption of democracy requires the ability of the individual to experiment with ideas and associations within a protected zone, as secured by the Constitution. The unobserved moment embodies the most basic of human rights, yet it is being squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.
Robert Scheer argues that the information revolution, while a source of public enlightenment, contains the seeds of freedom’s destruction in the form of a surveillance state that exceeds the wildest dream of the most ingenious dictator. The technology of surveillance, unless vigorously resisted, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower WorldBy Tom Engelhardt
In 1964, a book entitled “The Invisible Government” shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn’t fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that “invisible government” has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn’t have recognized.
E-Book- Surveillance Nation- Critical Reflections On Privacy and its Threats
Articles from The Nation magazine, 1931-2014
We’ve been living in 1984 since 1941. That was the year the Justice Department first authorized the wiretapping of Americans. “We shudder to think of what its agents will do with this new authorization,” The Nation warned in an editorial that year. Ever since then, our writers have investigated, exposed and denounced gross violations of our most basic civil liberties.
Now these articles have been collected in Surveillance Nation, a fascinating and timeless alternative history on the rise of the surveillance state. As our legal affairs correspondent, David Cole, writes in his introduction: “Time and again, writers for The Nation identified threats to privacy and liberty long before they were acknowledged by the broader public and media.”
Contributors to this important collection include Victor Navasky, Diana Trilling, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Foner, Laura Flanders, Jonathan Schell, Naomi Klein, Christopher Hayes, Patricia Williams, Fred Cook, Frank Donner and Jaron Lanier. Surveillance Nation is an intellectual and historical feast for anyone who wants to learn more about the kind of widespread abuses that Edward Snowden revealed in June 2013.
