Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power & Public Resistance

Until the watershed leak of top-secret documents by Edward Snowden to The Guardian (UK) and The Washington Post, most Americans did not realize the extent to which our government is actively acquiring personal information from telecommunications companies and other corporations. As made startlingly clear, the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on every phone call Americans have made over the past seven years. In that same time, the NSA and the FBI have gained the ability to access emails, photos, audio and video chats, and additional content from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Apple, and others, allegedly in order to track foreign targets.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs. She shows how corporations and government intelligence agencies mine data from sources as diverse as surveillance cameras, unmanned drones, iris scans, and medical records while combing websites, email, phone records, and social media for resale to third parties, including US intelligence agencies.

The ACLU's Michael German says of the examples shown in Boghosian's book, "This unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates, and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse." Boghosian adds, "If the trend is permitted to continue, we will soon live in a society where nothing is confidential, no information is really secure, and our civil liberties are under constant surveillance and con...