Surveillance A-Z

"In the same way as, last year, Danny Schechter's Madiba A - Z became one of the most widely read of the Mandela books, one that brilliantly took a non-narrative approach to illuminate the many sides of Mandela's complex personality, here Schechter uses the same format to illuminate one of the most complex and many-sided aspects of contemporary surveillance. Based on months of fresh interviews with key players among journalists, security experts, government officials and whistleblowers, Surveillance A - Z blasts open the brave new world in which we are living, where "balance" has become a euphemism to justify massive surveillance, where dissent is equated with criminality, where those who abuse our most basic constitutionally protected civil rightsseem to be immune from reproach or prosecution, and where a new type of soldier, "warrior geeks," wage cyber war. Schechter offers cogent insight in straightforward prose across the full spectrum of surveillance culture, from WikiLeaks, Manning, and Snowden to black world ops, from SAPs and ECIs to VRKs, from Dan Ellsberg to Thomas Drake and Bill Binney, from the law to the technology to the reality"--