The book warns the American public about developments in the United States in the digital age, including personal experiences, government spying, NSA surveillance and much more. Through story telling the reader learns about government secrets. Privacy is no longer a given but must be fought for. With the help of whistleblowers the truth is revealed. Join the protagonists on a journey to obtain accountability and transparency in a world where government and private industry encroach upon our rights and freedoms.

Secret Service provides the first comprehensive history of political policing in Canada – from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, through two world wars and the Cold War to the more recent 'war on terror.' This book reveals the extent, focus, and politics of government-sponsored surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations. Drawing on previously classified government records, the authors reveal that for over 150 years, Canada has run spy operations largely hidden from public or parliamentary scrutiny – complete with undercover agents, secret sources, agent provocateurs, coded communications, elaborate files, and all the usual apparatus of deception and betrayal so familiar to fans of spy fiction. As they argue, what makes Canada unique among Western countries is its insistent focus of its surveillance inwards, and usually against Canadian citizens. Secret Service highlights the many tensions that arise when undercover police and their covert methods are deployed too freely in a liberal democratic society. It will prove invaluable to readers attuned to contemporary debates about policing, national security, and civil rights in a post-9/11 world.

In many ways, the United States' post-9/11 engagement with legal rules is puzzling. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations authorized numerous contentious counterterrorism policies that sparked global outrage, yet they have repeatedly insisted that their actions were lawful and legitimate. In Plausible Legality, Rebecca Sanders examines how the US government interpreted, reinterpreted, and manipulated legal norms and what these justificatory practices imply about the capacity of law to constrain state violence. Through case studies on the use of torture, detention, targeted killing, and surveillance, Sanders provides a detailed analysis of how policymakers use law to achieve their political objectives and situates these patterns within a broader theoretical understanding of how law operates in contemporary politics. She argues that legal culture--defined as collectively shared understandings of legal legitimacy and appropriate forms of legal practice in particular contexts--plays a significant role in shaping state practice. In the global war on terror, a national security culture of legal rationalization encouraged authorities to seek legal cover-to construct the plausible legality of human rights violations-in order to ensure impunity for wrongdoing. Looking forward, law remains vulnerable to evasion and revision. As Sanders shows, despite the efforts of human rights advocates to encourage deeper compliance, the normalization of post-9/11 policy has created space for future administrations to further erode legal norms.

Filled with revelations and replete with telling detail, this riveting book lifts the curtain on the United States' secret intelligence operations in the war against Nazi Germany.

This book gathers the very best academic research to date on prison regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Grounded in solid ethnographic work, each chapter explores the informal dynamics of prisons in diverse territories and countries of the region – Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic – while theorizing how day-to-day life for the incarcerated has been forged in tandem between prison facilities and the outside world. The editors and contributors to this volume ask: how have fastest-rising incarceration rates in the world affected civilians’ lives in different national contexts? How do groups of prisoners form broader and more integrated ‘carceral communities’ across day-to-day relations of exchange and reciprocity with guards, lawyers, family, associates, and assorted neighbors? What differences exist between carceral communities from one national context to another? Last but not least, how do carceral communities, contrary to popular opinion, necessarily become a productive force for the good and welfare of incarcerated subjects, in addition to being a potential source of troubling violence and insecurity? This edited collection represents the most rigorous scholarship to date on the prison regimes of Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring the methodological value of ethnographic reflexivity inside prisons and theorizing how daily life for the incarcerated challenges preconceptions of prisoner subjectivity, so-called prison gangs, and bio-political order. Sacha Darke is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of Westminster, UK, Visiting Lecturer in Law at University of São Paulo, Brazil, and Affiliate of King’s Brazil Institute, King’s College London, UK. Chris Garces is Research Professor of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, and Visiting Lecturer in Law at Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, Ecuador. Luis Duno-Gottberg is Professor at Rice University, USA. He specializes in Caribbean culture, with emphasis on race and ethnicity, politics, violence, and visual culture. Andrés Antillano is Professor in Criminology at Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuala.

Prophetic when first published, even more relevant now, Wedge is the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself. Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents, Wedge reveals and re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI and CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have caused fistfights and turf tangles, breakdowns and cover-ups, public scandals and tragic deaths. A grand panorama of dramatic episodes, peopled by picaresque secret agents from Ian Fleming to Oliver North, Wedge is both a journey and a warning. From Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, and the plots to kill Castro through the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Iran Contra down to the Aldrich Ames affair, Robert Hanssen's treachery, and the hunt for Al Qaeda -- Wedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 -- Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.

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.