Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World

Tom Engelhardt

Sep 2014 · Haymarket Books

About this ebook

“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

Ratings and reviews

I love this book

About the author

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books; a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture; and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He lives in New York.Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for The Intercept and the author, most recently, of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.