John A. Whitehead

Written in 2015, this book is probably a bit dated. It makes two basic points: surveillance has become ubiquitous and police are becoming more like the army.

The surveillance piece repeatedly urges the reader not to underestimate the breadth and depth of surveillance. This is almost certainly true. Nearly all 19 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and NSA, share common, easily expandable cloud data contracted to Amazon. AI systems are coming on-line to facilitate and partially automate identification / evaluation of national threats. The eventual upside of these systems is probably inestimable. Given how strong they already must be, one wonders why the January 6 insurrection wasn't better anticipated and dealt with.

Local police forces are becoming more heavily armed. Whitehead reports small cities and towns where murders are rare or nonexistent nevertheless establishing extravagantly outfitted SWAT teams. The author amplifies this point by citing many more stories of police abuses and overreactions than he needs. Evidently he feels overkill is called for, fearing that we're entering very oppressive times in which overly zealous police will effectively strip citizens of rights. On the other hand, he grants that an alert citizenry can work as an effective counter-force to police excesses. Indeed, more recently we've seen bystanders filming bad police behavior, as well as the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations that in many communities spurred reforms. So perhaps there's room to hope we can avoid becoming East Germany in the 1980's. We'll see.… (meer)

This book started out very promising, with stats and stories about the intrusions the American government is making into the lives of its citizens, a violation of civil rights, privacy, and a host of other illegal doings.
Starting in about chapter 6, however, the author started comparing the current surveillance state with various movies and books, including Minority Report, 1984, and The Matrix. While some comparison is useful, page after page is not, and the book turned into a look-out-we're-getting-precogs-and-Big-Brother-watching-everything-we-do.
That being said, I still recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in our Constitution and the need to preserve and enforce it.… (meer)