Thursday, August 1, 2013

Five top books on the surveillance state

Seth Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco and author of the best-selling book Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. Subversives traces the FBI's secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal University of California president Clark Kerr.

For The Daily Beast, Rosenfeld named his five favorite books on the surveillance state. One title on the list:
The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency
by James Bamford

More than 30 years before government contractor Edward J. Snowden made international headlines with his disclosures about the National Security Agency, Bamford blew the lid of the nation’s most secretive agency with his 1982 book, the first comprehensive study of the NSA and a must-read for anyone concerned about its sweeping operations. As Bamford presciently wrote, “Like an ever-widening sinkhole, NSA’s surveillance technology will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and gradually eliminating more and more privacy.”
Read about the other books on the list.

The Puzzle Palace is one of Dan Brown's six favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue