Data and Goliath - The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone

Scott Shane · 400 pages

A dramatic account of the cat-and-mouse game between the Obama administration and most-wanted terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki traces the President's shifting campaigns and the evolution of the robotic technology that ended Awlaki's life.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

Luke Harding · 346 pages

"IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: "I AM A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom

Rebecca MacKinnon · 304 pages

Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook's obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it i

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

James Bamford · 395 pages

James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency's existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public.The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Masha Gessen · 333 pages

This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oliga

North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

John Sweeney · 338 pages

"North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and big brother is always watching: it is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the countr

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State

Dana Priest, William M. Arkin · 320 pages

Describes the enormous, top-secret, invisible universe created by the government after 9/11 and describes why the system in place to keep us safe may actually be putting us in greater danger.

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography

Julian Assange · 339 pages

Most people reading this review will know the sordid story of how "Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography" came to be published against the wishes of its subject and copyright holder Julian Assange and its author, Assange's ghostwriter, the Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan. Predictably, Canongate's explanatory note at the beginning of the book omits salient details. Julian Assange signed a

Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege

Will Potter · 256 pages

Examines the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to target and prosecute environmentalists and animal rights activists, discussing people and events associated with radical activism, and describing political, legal, and public relations strategies that attach nonviolent acts of civil disobedience with "eco-terrorist" labels.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald · 272 pages

Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide is the story of one of the greatest national security leaks in US history. In June 2013, reporter and political commentator Glenn Greenwald published a series of reports in the Guardian which rocked the world. The reports revealed shocking truths about the extent to which the National Security Agency had been gathering information about US citizens and intercepti

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

Philip P. Pan · 398 pages

A vivid chronicle of the world's most successful authoritarian state. Pan, who reported from China for seven years, eluded the police and succeeded in going where few Western journalists have dared. From the rusting factories in the industrial northeast to a tabloid newsroom in the booming south, from a small-town courtroom to the plush offices of the nation's wealthiest tycoons, he takes us insid

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder · 128 pages

In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism a

This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

Andy Greenberg · 384 pages

Who Are The Cypherpunks? This is the unauthorized telling of the revolutionary cryptography story behind the motion picture The Fifth Estate in theatres this October, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, a documentary out now. WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful cryptographic code to hide leakers’ identities while they spill the private data of

Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition

Silky Shah · 280 pages

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden · 256 pages

The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. In Escape From C

The Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

Gil Durán · 352 pages

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

Tim Wu · 224 pages

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Barbara Demick · 314 pages

A remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years--a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape most of us have nev

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann · 186 pages

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It

Marc Goodman · 392 pages

An FBI futurist and senior advisor to Interpol analyzes the digital underground to reveal the alarming ways criminals, corporations and countries are using emerging technologies to target individuals and wage war.

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen · 333 pages

This is the most important - and fascinating - book yet written about how the digital age with affect our world' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve JobsFrom two leading thinkers, the widely anticipated book that describes a new, hugely connected world of the future, full of challenges and benefits which are ours to meet and harness. The New Digital Age is the product of an unparalleled collaboration

Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake · 290 pages

Security expert Richard A. Clarke goes beyond "geek talk" to succinctly explain how cyber weapons work and how vulnerable America is to the new world of nearly untraceable cyber criminals and spies. This sobering story of technology, government, and military strategy involving criminals, spies, soldiers, and hackers begins the much needed public policy debate about what America's doctrine and stra