Surveillance In America

Never before has so much been known about so many. CCTV cameras, TSA scanners, NSA databases, big data marketers, predator drones, "stop and frisk" tactics, Facebook algorithms, hidden spyware, and even old-fashioned nosy neighbors—surveillance has become so ubiquitous that we take its presence for granted. While many types of surveillance are pitched as ways to make us safer, almost no one has examined the unintended consequences of living under constant scrutiny and how it changes the way we think and feel about the world. In Under Surveillance, Randolph Lewis offers a highly original look at the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic challenges of living with surveillance in America since 9/11. Taking a broad and humanistic approach, Lewis explores the growth of surveillance in surprising places, such as childhood and nature. He traces the rise of businesses designed to provide surveillance and security, including those that cater to the Bible Belt's houses of worship. And he peers into the dark side of playful surveillance, such as eBay's online guide to "Fun with Surveillance Gadgets." A worried but ultimately genial guide to this landscape, Lewis helps us see the hidden costs of living in a "control society" in which surveillance is deemed essential to governance and business alike. Written accessibly for a general audience, Under Surveillance prompts us to think deeply about what Lewis calls "the soft tissue damage" inflicted by the culture of surveillance.

Safeguarding Our Privacy and Our Values in an Age of Mass Surveillance America’s mass surveillance programs, once secret, can no longer be ignored. While Edward Snowden began the process in 2013 with his leaks of top secret documents, the Obama administration’s own reforms have also helped bring the National Security Agency and its programs of signals intelligence collection out of the shadows. The real question is: What should we do about mass surveillance? Timothy Edgar, a long-time civil liberties activist who worked inside the intelligence community for six years during the Bush and Obama administrations, believes that the NSA’s programs are profound threat to the privacy of everyone in the world. At the same time, he argues that mass surveillance programs can be made consistent with democratic values, if we make the hard choices needed to bring transparency, accountability, privacy, and human rights protections into complex programs of intelligence collection. Although the NSA and other agencies already comply with rules intended to prevent them from spying on Americans, Edgar argues that the rules—most of which date from the 1970s—are inadequate for this century. Reforms adopted during the Obama administration are a good first step but, in his view, do not go nearly far enough. Edgar argues that our communications today—and the national security threats we face—are both global and digital. In the twenty first century, the only way to protect our privacy as Americans is to do a better job of protecting everyone’s privacy. Beyond Surveillance: Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA explains both why and how we can do this, without sacrificing the vital intelligence capabilities we need to keep ourselves and our allies safe. If we do, we set a positive example for other nations that must confront challenges like terrorism while preserving human rights. The United States already leads the world in mass surveillance. It can lead the world in mass surveillance reform.

Surveillance in America provides a historical exploration of FBI surveillance practices and policies since 1920 based on recently declassified FBI files. Using the new information available through these documents, Ivan Greenberg sheds light on the activities and beliefs of top FBI officials as they develop and implement surveillance practices. Paying particular attention to the uses of the media, Greenberg provides a thorough reconsideration of the Watergate scandal and the role of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat.” He exposes new evidence which suggests that Felt led a faction at the FBI that worked together to bring down President Nixon. The book concludes with an in-depth treatment of surveillance practices since the year 2000. He considers the question of “surveillance as harassment” and looks at the further erosion of privacy. stemming from Obama’s counter-terror policies which extend those of the Bush Administration’s second term. The startling increase in surveillance since the events of September 11th, reveal the extent to which America is losing the battle for civil liberties.

This book surveys the size, scope, and nature of government surveillance in 21st-century America, with a particular focus on technology-enabled surveillance and its impact on privacy and other civil liberties.

The United States and Europe have recently experienced a significant expansion in the use of undercover police tactics and technological means of surveillance. In a democratic society, such tactics raise significant questions for public policy and social research. New and sophisticated forms of crime and social control (and their internationalization) represent an important and neglected topic. Realizing this, the leading scholars in this field created a European and American working group for the comparative study of police surveillance. This collaborative, landmark volume reports the results of their work. It is the first book ever devoted to the comparative study of the topic and includes articles on the historical development of covert policing in Europe and its spread to the United States (where it was extended and recently exported back to Europe), plus detailed accounts of the use of covert tactics in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden, Canada and the United States. Audience: Social scientists, historians, policy makers, lawyers, and criminal justice practitioners

Using exclusive access to key insiders, Shane Harris charts the rise of America's surveillance state over the past twenty-five years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us. Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide. But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror. Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

The history of recruiting citizens to spy on each other in the United States. Ever since the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, we think about surveillance as the data-tracking digital technologies used by the likes of Google, the National Security Administration, and the military. But in reality, the state and allied institutions have a much longer history of using everyday citizens to spy and inform on their peers. Citizen Spies shows how “If You See Something, Say Something” is more than just a new homeland security program; it has been an essential civic responsibility throughout the history of the United States. From the town crier of Colonial America to the recruitment of youth through “junior police,” to the rise of Neighborhood Watch, AMBER Alerts, and Emergency 9-1-1, Joshua Reeves explores how ordinary citizens have been taught to carry out surveillance on their peers. Emphasizing the role humans play as “seeing” and “saying” subjects, he demonstrates how American society has continuously fostered cultures of vigilance, suspicion, meddling, snooping, and snitching. Tracing the evolution of police crowd-sourcing from “Hue and Cry” posters and America’s Most Wanted to police-affiliated social media, as well as the U.S.’s recurrent anxieties about political dissidents and ethnic minorities from the Red Scare to the War on Terror, Reeves teases outhow vigilance toward neighbors has long been aligned with American ideals of patriotic and moral duty. Taking the long view of the history of the citizen spy, this book offers a much-needed perspective for those interested in how we arrived at our current moment in surveillance culture and contextualizes contemporary trends in policing.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.