Spying on Democracy

Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance

Until the watershed leak of top-secret documents by Edward Snowden to the Guardian UK and the Washington Post, most Americans did not realize the extent to which our government is actively acquiring personal information from telecommunications companies and other corporations. As made startlingly clear, the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on every phone call Americans have made over the past seven years. In that same time, the NSA and the FBI have gained the ability to access emails, photos, audio and video chats, and additional content from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Apple and others, allegedly in order to track foreign targets.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases and their perceived political beliefs. She shows how corporations and government intelligence agencies mine data from sources as diverse as surveillance cameras and unmanned drones to iris scans and medical records, while combing websites, email, phone records and social media for resale to third parties, including U.S. intelligence agencies.

The ACLU’s Michael German says of the examples shown in Boghosian’s book, “this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.” Boghosian adds, “If the trend is permitted to continue, we will soon live in a society where nothing is confidential, no information is really secure, and our civil liberties are under constant surveillance and control.” Spying on Democracy is a timely, invaluable and accessible primer for anyone concerned with protecting privacy, freedom and the U.S. Constitution.

Date published: 06/08/13

Publisher: Publisher name

Formats: Paperback, Audiobook, Ebook

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“Spying on Democracy is an excellent collection . . . fast-paced, active, and punctuated with photographs . . . a colorful, illustrative primer on governmental and private-sector intelligence gathering.”

Julia Horwitz, The Electronic Privacy Information Center Newsletter

“Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy is chock full of stories about how innocent people’s lives were turned upside-down by public and private sector surveillance programs. It shows how this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.”

Mike German, Former FBI Agent and Brennan Center Fellow

“Spying on Democracy puts a laser focus on a challenge faced by millions of Americans who, like me, took a solemn oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Let’s hope Americans will read Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy and learn from it. For, as Dr. King put it, ‘There is such a thing as too late.”

Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

“Modern life has a way of making us forget the deep political power of privacy. Spying on Democracy shakes that complacency, explaining how journalists, attorneys, political dissidents, religious groups, even children, are subject to ever new forms of surveillance in the name of convenience, marketing, and security. This book’s great contribution is to remind us how government and private-sector control over information can have shocking implications for freedom and democracy.”

Alexandra Natapoff, author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice