Books like Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Glenn Greenwald chronicles the landmark 2013 NSA leak by Edward Snowden, revealing the agency’s global surveillance of U.S. citizens and its implications for privacy and national security.

Michael Lewis exposes how political short‑sightedness threatens U.S. programs from food stamps to the Census to nuclear oversight, revealing the unsung public servants who keep the government’s critical functions running.

Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency employee, released a trove of classified documents exposing global mass surveillance, sparking a worldwide debate on privacy and security.

"Laura Poitras: Astro Noise" is the first solo museum exhibition by artist, filmmaker, and journalist Laura Poitras. This immersive installation of new work builds on topics important to Poitras, including mass surveillance, the war on terror, the U.S. drone program, Guantánamo Bay Prison, occupation, and torture. For the exhibition, Poitras is creating an interrelated series of installations in the Whitney's eighth-floor Hurst Family Galleries. The exhibition expands on her project to document post-9/11 America, engaging visitors in formats outside her non-fiction filmmaking. Instead she will create immersive environments that incorporate documentary footage, architectural interventions, primary documents, and narrative structures to invite visitors to interact with the material in strikingly intimate and direct ways. The title, "Astro Noise", refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. The Snowden archive partially inspired Poitras's presentation at the Whitney.

A graphic overview of Edward Snowden’s whistle‑blowing leak of NSA surveillance files, examining the consequences of mass electronic surveillance in the U.S.

Dragnet Nation exposes how governments, businesses, and criminals harvest personal data through online ads, mobile tracking, and electronic surveillance, warning that internalized monitoring can silence freedom and erode civil rights.

Julian Assange convenes key thinkers to debate whether the internet’s cryptographic tools and surveillance practices will liberate or dominate society.

This is the first biography of one of the most interesting and controversial social theorists of our time. Murray N. Rothbard was the founder of the libertarian movement, a radical free marketeer who came of age in the era of collectivism and fought all his life for individualism and laissez-faire against overwhelming odds. The story of his life is at the same time a cavalcade of virtually all of the controversial events, ideas, and personalities of the latter part of the twentieth century. The author of twenty-eight books and thousands of articles, Rothbard's life goal was to found a science of liberty, a comprehensive libertarian system of social thought encompassing philosophy, ethics, economics, and history. This book tells the story of the intellectual adventure that was Rothbard's life, his relationship with the great libertarian economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, and his intellectual growth and development as an economist and a thinker. While Rothbard's contributions to the history of social thought are important, his life story is interesting in itself: against almost impossible odds he managed to single-handedly create the libertarian movement out of thin air at a time when such ideas were considered completely outside the pale. "An Enemy of the State" traces Rothbard's ideological odyssey, from the Old Right of the Chicago Tribune and the 'isolationist' America First Committee, to the conservative movement of the fifties and early sixties, to the New Left of the mid-sixties, and then on to the Libertarian Party and the post-Cold War return to his Old Right roots. Rothbard was that interesting combination, an intellectual system-builder and theorist who was also an intellectual street fighter, a scholar, and a man of action. Anyone interested in the history of ideas, whether or not they agree with Rothbard's ideology, is bound to be captivated by and drawn into the story of his fascinating life.

Whistleblower Mark Klein tells the story of the illegal government spying apparatus installed at an AT&T office by the National Security Agency, and his battle to bring it to light and protect Americans' 4th Amendment rights. After the *New York Times* revealed in 2005 that the NSA was spying on Americans' phone calls and e-mail without Constitutionally-required court warrants, the Bush administration openly defended this practice which also violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. All details of the highly secret program remained hidden from the public until Klein came forward. A technician for over 22 years at telecom giant AT&T, Klein was working in the Internet room in San Francisco in 2003 and discovered the NSA was vacuuming everyone's communications into a secret room, and he had the documents to prove it (sample pages included). He went to the media in 2006, and then became a witness in a lawsuit brought against the company by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"In No Place to Hide, Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., lays out in detail the post-9/11 marriage of private data and technology companies and government anti-terror initiatives to create something entirely new: a security-industrial complex. Drawing on his years of investigation, O'Harrow shows how the government now depends on burgeoning private reservoirs of information about almost every aspect of our lives to promote homeland security and fight the war on terror." "Consider the following: When you use your cell phone, the phone company knows where you are and when. If you use a discount card, your grocery and prescription purchases are recorded, profiled, and analyzed. Many new cars have built-in devices that enable companies to track from afar details about your movements. Software and information companies can even generate graphical link-analysis charts illustrating exactly how each person in a room is related to every other - through jobs, roommates, family, and the like. Almost anyone can buy a dossier on you, including almost everything it takes to commit identity theft, for less than fifty dollars." "O'Harrow tells the inside stories of key players in this new world, from software inventors to counterintelligence officials. He reveals how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies. And he examines the impact of this new security system on our traditional notions of civil liberties, autonomy, and privacy, and the ways it threatens to undermine some of our society's most cherished values, even while offering us a sense of security."--BOOK JACKET

A detailed investigation of how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s, guided by powerful elites and private interests, set the stage for the 9/11 attacks and led to government secrecy and implication of intelligence agencies in terrorist circles.

There is a hidden country within the United States. It was formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them. The government secrecy industry speaks in a private language of codes and acronyms, and follows an arcane set of rules and customs designed to perpetuate itself, repel penetration, and deflect oversight. It justifies itself with the assertion that the American values worth preserving are often best sustained by subterfuge and deception. There are indications that this deep state is crumbling.

New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth exposes the hidden world of zero‑day exploits, tracing how U.S. agencies once hoarded and now lose control over the most coveted cyber weapons that threaten elections, infrastructure, and national security.

"Personal information contained in your emails, phone calls, GPS movements and social media is a hot commodity, and corporations are cashing in by mining and selling the data they collect about our private lives. "Spying on Democracy" reveals how the government acquires and uses such information to target those individuals and/or groups it deems threatening"--