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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Betty Medsger · 624 pages

The never-before-told complete story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists -- quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans -- that exposed the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected: that J. Edgar Hoover was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.

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

Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

Ted Koppel · 289 pages

Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

Shane Harris · 288 pages

The United States military now views cyberspace as the "fifth domain" of warfare, alongside land, air, sea, and space. The Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and the CIA field teams of hackers who launch cyber strikes against enemy targets--and amass staggering quantities of personal information on all of us. These same virtual warriors, along with a growing band of private-sector counterpart

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 Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright · 550 pages

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

Mark Mazzetti · 400 pages

An account of the transformation of the CIA and America's special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world's dark spaces: the new American way of war.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages

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

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States · 567 pages

Final report of the National Commission on terrorist attacks upon the United States. The result of months of intensive investigations and inquiries by a specially appointed bipartisan panel. While the commission notes that future attacks are probably inevitable, a coordinated preventive effort along with a clear plan to respond with efficiency can offer Americans some hope in a post-9/11 world.

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Gary Webb · 574 pages

Gary Webb draws from thousands of pages of once-secret files from the CIA, DEA, and FBI, the L.A. Sheriff's Department, and recently declassified papers from the Iran-Contra investigation. Together with Nicaraguan journalist Georg Hodel, Webb interviewed former members of the Contra drug ring, as well as former federal prosecutors, CIA and DEA agents, and former Central American police officials.

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

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec Anonymous

Parmy Olson

*We Are Anonymous* is the first full account of how a loosely assembled group of hackers scattered across the globe formed a new kind of insurgency, seized headlines, and tortured the feds -- and the ultimate betrayal that would eventually bring them down. Parmy Olson goes behind the headlines and into the world of Anonymous and LulzSec with unprecedented access, drawing upon hundreds of conversat

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

Bruce Schneier · 383 pages

"Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who's with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you're thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.

Holy War Inc. Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden

Peter L. Bergen · 304 pages

"On September 11, 2001, the world in which we live was changed forever. The twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, one side of the Pentagon burst into flames, and more than six thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. As shocking as it was, it had been long in the making: the assault was the most sophisticated and