Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (TomDispatch Books)
Politics and government, Espionage
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
&“A book about secrets and surveillance . . . [from] one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing&” (Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark). 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. &“Tom Engelhardt is an iconoclast . . . Again and again, he goes to the heart of the matter, drawing on his awesomely wide reading, his knowledge of history, and his acute political radar system.&” —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold&’s Ghost and Mirror at Midnight &“This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage.&” —Rebecca Solnit of Call Them by Their True Names &“Tom Engelhardt&’s writing on the new forms of government surveillance is crucial because he has spent a lifetime studying the rise of the national security state.&” —Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan