Description: The first complete history of the American surveillance state, from J. Edgar Hoover to Obama
Brief description:
David H. Price is Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin's University's Department of Society and Social Justice. He is the author of a number of books on the FBI and CIA, and has written articles for The Nation, Monthly Review, CounterPunch, Guardian and Le Monde. His work has been translated into five languages.
Review Quotes: 'Few writers have done more than David Price to drag the secret history of America out of the shadows and into the clarifying light of public scrutiny. In a nation obsessed with secrets, the biggest and darkest secret of all is the one Price exposes here: the deviously surreptitious - and often illegal - lengths our own government has gone to surveil and disrupt the daily lives of its own citizens''Wielding a finely-honed anthropological perspective and armed only with the Freedom of Information Act, David Price has spent decades of meticulous research in uncovering the sordid and often absurd history of American political surveillance. Rather than Orwell's fictional tales of Big Brother, his book makes extensive use of the files compiled by the FBI and its legions of informers to show how the realities of governmental monitoring and harassment impacted on the lives of law-abiding women and men whose words and deeds were deemed to threaten dominant power structures in American society''Relentlessly dissects the history of the American surveillance state, from the Palmer Raids to the Snowden Files and beyond. Price's razor-sharp analysis exposes the malignant tissue connecting America's spy agencies to the forces of capital'