Showing titles in Freedom & Security

Valerie Wilson, the object of the "Plame" CIA leak case that resulted in the conviction of the vice-president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has spoken publicly only twice since she was outed in July 2003. Now she tells not only the real story behind the leak, but describes her life at the CIA and what happened when her cover was blown.

Amassing unimaginable amounts of personal data, giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple - once symbols of American ingenuity and freedom - have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power. Decades of unchecked data collection have given Big Tech more targeted control over Americans’ daily lives than any company or government in the world. In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri argues that these mega-corporations - controlled by the robber barons of the modern era - are the gravest threat to American liberty in decades.

Prejudential is a concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and Black Americans through the lens of the presidents who have been elected to represent all of its people.

Nonie Darwish lived for thirty years in a majority Muslim nation. Everything about her life was dictated by the Islamic law code known as Sharia. But Sharia isn't staying in majority Muslim nations. Darwish now lives in the West and brings a warning; the goal of radical Islam is to bring Sharia law to your country. If that happens, the fabric of Western law and liberty will be ripped in two. Weaving personal experience together with extensive documentation and research, Darwish exposes the facts and reveals the global threat posed by Sharia law.

Isolationism became one of the most influential political trends in American history. From the founding era until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States shunned strategic commitments abroad, making only brief detours during the Spanish-American War and World War I. Amid World War II and the Cold War, Americans abandoned isolationism; they tried to run the world rather than run away from it. But isolationism is making a comeback. Author Charles Kupchan explores the enduring connection between the isolationist impulse and the American experience.

On May 30, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, amid the protests that rocked our nation after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, thirty-eight-year-old white bar owner and Marine veteran Jake Gardner fatally shot James Scurlock, a twenty-two-year-old Black protestor and young father. What followed were two investigations of Scurlock’s death, one conducted by the white county attorney Don Kleine, who concluded that Gardner had legally acted in self-defense and released him without a trial, and a second grand jury inquiry conducted by Black special prosecutor Fred Franklin that indicted Gardner.

During the early and most dangerous years of the cold war, a handful of Americans, led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, revolutionized spying and warfare. In great secrecy and beyond the prying eyes of Congress and the press, they built exotic new machines that opened up the Soviet Union to surveillance and protected the United States from surprise nuclear attack. Secret Empire is the dramatic story of these men and their inventions, told in full for the first time.

The entire vast modern American intelligence system—the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes—can be traced back to the dire straits that Britain faced at the end of June 1940. Before World War II, the US had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch secret campaigns against enemies overseas. It was only through Winston Churchill’s determination to mobilize the US to help in their fight against Hitler that the first American spy service was born, one that was built by scratch in the background of WWII.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One - the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about - without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Great Abolitionist is the first major biography of Charles Sumner to be published in over fifty years. Acclaimed historian Stephen Puleo relates the story of one of the most influential non-presidents in American history with evocative and accessible prose, transporting listeners back to an era when our leaders exhibited true courage and authenticity in the face of unprecedented challenges.

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. It's time to demand an internet by and for the people.

Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men.

Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip. Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way.

In 1935, the Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from the reluctant hobos (many of them displaced farmers who had fled the midwestern dust bowls), robbed dairies, and engaged in all manner of nefarious crimes, including murder. This history was suppressed until 1989, when former logger, Vietnam vet, and Spokane cop Tony Bamonte discovered a strange 1955 deathbed confession while researching a thesis on local law enforcement history.

What is intelligence-led policing? Who came up with the idea? Where did it come from? How does it relate to other policing paradigms? What distinguishes an intelligence-led approach to crime reduction? How is it designed to have an impact on crime? Does it prevent crime? These are just a few of the questions that this book seeks to answer. This revised and updated second edition includes new case studies and viewpoints, a revised crime funnel based on new data, and a new chapter examining the expanding role of technology and big data in intelligence-led policing.

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

The wait is over. After a two-year investigation, the results of The Mueller Report have been released to the public. Now listen to an audio version of one of the most talked about government documents in history. These are the redacted findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, which was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, including exploring any links or coordination between President Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.

James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be - and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump presidency. In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works.

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. A stunning military achievement, it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, tricked the Nazis into believing that the Allied attacks would come in Calais and Norway rather than Normandy.