By Christian Parenti

On a customary day, chances are you'll make a choice on a mobile phone, withdraw cash at an ATM, stopover at the mall, and make a purchase order with a bank card. each one of those regimen transactions leaves a electronic path for presidency firms and companies to entry. As state-of-the-art historian and journalist Christian Parenti issues out, those daily intrusions on privateness, whereas innocuous in themselves, are a part of a continuing (and clandestine) enlargement of regimen surveillance in American existence during the last centuries-from controlling slaves within the previous South to enforcing early legal justice and monitoring immigrants. Parenti explores the function desktops are enjoying in making a entire new international of doubtless benign technologies-such as charge cards, web site "cookies," and digital toll collection-that have increased this development within the twenty-first century. The delicate Cage bargains a compelling, very important background lesson for each American fascinated with the growth of surveillance into our private and non-private lives.

Show description

Read Online or Download The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror PDF

Best intelligence & espionage books

Managing Risk in USAF Planning

Provides a risk-management method could aid senior Air strength leaders to (1) concentration making plans at the so much salient threats, (2) achieve larger readability at the dangers linked to replacement classes of motion throughout a number of futures, (3) retain a feeling of the continual uncertainties linked to any coverage selection, and (4) successfully converse their judgments approximately danger to key audiences.

Networks and Netwars : The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

Netwar―like cyberwar―describes a brand new spectrum of clash that's rising within the wake of the data revolution. What uncommon netwar is the networked organizational constitution of its practitioners and their quickness in coming jointly in swarming assaults. To confront this new form of clash, it can be crucial for governments, army, and legislations enforcement to start networking themselves.

Nazi Refugee Turned Gestapo Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann, 1895-1971

Why could a journalist who was once an ardent socialist and an anti-Nazi through the waning years of the Weimar Republic choose to visit paintings for the Gestapo in another country? Hans Wesemann, a veteran of global warfare I and a winning journalist, fled his local Germany in 1933 after writing a couple of anti-Nazi articles.

The Easy Day Was Yesterday: The Extreme Life of An SAS Soldier

From his cage in a putrid, overcrowded Indian gaol, Paul Jordan displays on a lifestyles lived at the aspect and curses the miscalculation that robbed him of his freedom. His adolescence, marred by way of the lack of his father and brother, makes him hell bent on being the easiest of the easiest – an ambition he achieves by means of being chosen to affix the elite SAS.

Additional info for The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror

Sample text

36 Numerous slave narratives and Works Progress Administration interviews with former bondspersons dwell on the importance of reading, but 23 THE SOFT CAGE no author approaches the eloquence, clarity, and measured wrath of Frederick Douglass. His well-known odyssey into literacy and freedom began as a boy with the aid of his owner's wife, who at first was immensely proud of his progress. In fact, Mrs. Auld "exultingly" and naively told her husband about her apt pupil "and of her intention to persevere in teaching [him]...

29 THE SOFT CAGE For even more physical detail: Negro man Slave named Bob, Copper color, high cheek bones, 511 inches high, weighs about 150 pounds' 22 years old very white teeth and a space between the center of the upper teeth. 55 The wanted posters and ads are examples of both antebellum social control and of the technical and organizational inadequacy of that control: biometric identification was applied to runaways after the fact. WAR AND STANDARDIZATION The Civil War created among other problems a crisis of identification in the South.

30 Or these: 22 ANTEBELLUM ID RUN away from the subscriber, a Mulatto girl named Agnes... 31 RUN AWAY from the subscriber. . a servant named SAMUEL HOMES. . 32 White indentured servants, like slaves, were known to hack into the mainframe of literacy. "33 Both whites and Blacks shared their skills: an indented servant man named WILLIAM GILL, whose dialect will very readily discover him to be an Irishman.... 34 Owners in search of escapees called attention to forged passes in part to encourage greater scrutiny of such documents.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.23 of 5 – based on 45 votes