Skillful chart of a surveillance society out of control. The question is: Who will snoop on the snoopers, and what laws will...
Washington Post reporter O’Harrow investigates the possibilities of maintaining privacy protections in the wake of increased surveillance after 9/11. At this date, the picture is grim.
“The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people,” he writes. Databases and dossiers, surveillance cameras, biometrics, even “non-invasive neuro-electric sensors”: the information highway meets national insecurity. From Starbucks to the subway to the sidewalk, you are being watched, every electronic transaction recorded. Your personal identification material, your eating and sexual preferences, your family history are all probably on a chip somewhere, easily accessible. Personal data is now a full-blown commodity, bought and sold like sow bellies. Although O’Harrow voices a clear concern over the ethics of such snooping, he concentrates on the nature and tools of data collection, persuasively delineating how that information is abused and how unavoidable mistakes have profound consequences. Exacerbating this problem is the rising incidence of identity theft, thanks to the ease with which databases can be accessed. With visions of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy dancing in his head, O’Harrow is deeply wary of John Ashcroft’s desire to gut the Privacy Act of 1974. He keeps a level tone, never getting frantic, but then he doesn't have to. The horror stories speak for themselves: people whose credit ratings have been destroyed because of foul-ups, people who have been arrested because they happened to have the same name as a criminal, people grilled by security personnel because they fit a certain profile, political activists tagged as “criminal extremists.” In each case, O'Harrow shows, it was a Sisyphean task to get the records set straight—and forget about an apology.
Skillful chart of a surveillance society out of control. The question is: Who will snoop on the snoopers, and what laws will keep them in check?Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5480-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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