Dragnet Nation

An inside look at who's watching you, what they know and why it matters. We are being watched. We see online ads from websites we've visited, long after we've moved on to other interests. Our smartphones and cars transmit our location, enabling us to know what's in the neighborhood but also enabling others to track us. And the federal government, we recently learned, has been conducting a massive data-gathering surveillance operation across the Internet and on our phone lines. In Dragnet Nation, award-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin reports from the front lines of America's surveillance economy, offering a revelatory and unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data. In a world where we can be watched in our own homes, where we can no longer keep secrets, and where we can be impersonated, financially manipulated, or even placed in a police lineup, Angwin argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, until we lose the very freedom that makes us unique individuals. Appalled at such a prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a "burner" phone, showing how difficult it is for an average citizen to resist the dragnets' reach. Her book is a cautionary tale for all of us, with profound implications for our values, our society, and our very selves.

"People out of Place reshapes our understanding of the 1960s by telling a previously unknown story about often overlooked criminal laws prohibiting vagrancy. As Beats, hippies, war protesters, Communists, racial minorities, civil rights activists, prostitutes, single women, poor people, and sexual minorities challenged vagrancy laws, the laws became a shared constitutional target for clashes over radically different visions of the nation's future"--

Sniper is the behind-the-scenes story of one of the most frightening rampages to occur in U.S. history—and how it was stopped. For more than three weeks, the nation watched in disbelief as Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs were held hostage by anonymous gunmen shooting innocent civilians at random. Sniper is the definitive account of those alleged gunmen, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, and the massive manhunt that ended with their capture by a heavily armed SWAT team in an early-morning raid at an interstate highway rest stop. Two Washington Post reporters, Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane, retrace the steps of Muhammad and Malvo from their first meeting on the island of Antigua to Malvo’s defiant confession in a Virginia jail. Drawing on exclusive reporting about that confession, internal police documents, and a wide range of law-enforcement sources, Horwitz and Ruane track in remarkable detail the murderous trail Muhammad and Malvo are accused of having followed to the Washington area and reconstruct the eerie way in which the two moved invisibly around the nation’s capital in the midst of one of the largest police investigations in U.S. history. Horwitz and Ruane also take you inside the police command center where local and state police, joined by the federal government’s most experienced crime fighters, worked desperately to stop the killings, unaware that a fundamental error—investigators were wrongly fixated on a white van—was allowing Muhammad and Malvo to slip through the dragnet. We meet FBI negotiators, veteran detectives, forensics experts, prosecutors, and politicians who faced perhaps the biggest challenge of their careers as they confronted frustrating setbacks, logistical nightmares, and the overwhelming pressure of a high-stakes investigation. In a fast-paced narrative that outdoes even the most acclaimed television cop shows, Sniper recounts the extraordinary police work that enabled investigators to quickly exploit the clues handed to them by Muhammad and Malvo that finally led to their arrest. Part gripping drama, part real-life portrait of law enforcement at work, Sniper is also a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of American society in an age of terrorism.

Since 2006, award-winning investigative journalist Nick Davies has worked tirelessly — determined, driven, brilliant — to uncover the truth about the goings on behind the scenes at the News of the World and News International. This book brings us the definitive, inside story of the whole scandal. In Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, Nick Davies reveals how he worked with a network of lawyers, politicians, and celebrities to expose the facts and to stand up to Rupert Murdoch, arguably one of the most powerful men in the world; how News International attempted to protect itself with lies and threats and money; how the police and the press regulators failed; how the prime minister ended up with the wrong man inside his office. This book discloses in detail for the first time the full extent of crimes committed by the corporation and other Fleet Street papers, and probes the relationship between Murdoch and his network with government. It is also a thrilling, nail-biting account of an investigative journalist’s journey, showing us how the quest unfolded, and is a shining example of the might of good journalism. This is not simply a story about journalists behaving badly, this is a story about power and truth. Ambitious, comprehensive, gripping, essential — Hack Attack is the definitive book about the biggest scandal of our age. There will be no other book like it.

Winner of the Canadian National Business Book Award 2016 Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2015 In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the US smartphone market. Today that number is less than one per cent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is the riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed; instead, the rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway. With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors, and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in a small Canadian city and went on to control half of the US smartphone market. However, at the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest-growing company, internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: the entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. Expertly told by acclaimed journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen. In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens. Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.

Why has U.S. national security policy scarcely changed from the Bush to the Obama administration? And why does it matter? The theory of 'double government' posed by the 19th century English scholar Walter Bagehot suggests a disquieting answer. The public is encouraged to believe that the presidency, Congress, and the courts make security policy. That belief sustains these institutions' legitimacy. Yet their authority is largely illusory. National security policy is made, instead, by a 'Trumanite network' of several hundred members that is largely concealed from public view.

A Companion to American Immigration is an authoritative collection of original essays by leading scholars on the major topics and themes underlying American immigration history. Focuses on the two most important periods in American Immigration history: the Industrial Revolution (1820-1930) and the Globalizing Era (Cold War to the present) Provides an in-depth treatment of central themes, including economic circumstances, acculturation, social mobility, and assimilation Includes an introductory essay by the volume editor.