The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State [Hardcover]

Shane Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 18, 2010

Using exclusive access to key government insiders, Shane Harris chronicles the rise of America's surveillance state over the past 25 years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us.

In 1983, Admiral John Poindexter, President Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the U.S. might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut, if intelligence agencies could have analyzed in real time the data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured technical know-how and government funds into his dream--a system that would sift reams of information for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After 9/11, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it has evolved into a secretly funded operation that can gather a trove of personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide.

Despite billions of dollars spent on this quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has moved from the province of right-wing technocrats into the mainstream, becoming a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror.

Harris puts us behind the scenes where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an Army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow National Security Agency Director Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. And we see Poindexter return to government with a seemingly implausible idea: that the authorities can collect data about citizens and at the same time protect their privacy. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it secretly becomes a "black program" at the NASA, then engaged in a massive surveillance of Americans' phone calls and e-mails.

When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Harris, a reporter for National Journal, details the rise of a band of mavericks in national security and intelligence organizations that has erected an American surveillance state. In this timely and admirably balanced account, Harris focuses on the role of a handful of key figures, including Reagan-era National Security Adviser John Poindexter, as they campaigned for information technology to identify terrorists. The controversial Poindexter started the campaign after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon; the mission was imbued with greater urgency after September 11; with the support of the Bush administration, the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired a research project that Poindexter had developed called Total Information Awareness that uses advanced data-mining techniques to collect mountains of data—and has trapped countless innocent citizens in the NSA's electronic nets. After the NSA's warrantless surveillance was exposed in 2005, Congress passed largely cosmetic reforms that left the surveillance state intact. Harris carefully examines how the nexus between terrorism and technology has complicated the age-old conflict between security and liberty and calls for a national debate on the issue. This informative and dramatic narrative is an excellent place to start. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1983, following a terrorist attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut, John Poindexter, a national security advisor, lamented that better surveillance and analysis could have prevented the attack. That lament resounded again on 9/11 when the “watchers”—information technologists working for the nation’s intelligence and national security services—fretted that ongoing debates about privacy versus national security continued to hamper their incredible capabilities. Between those attacks and even since then, Poindexter has worked tirelessly, in and out of government, with a band of “warrior geeks” to develop a Total Information Awareness system that can track potential terrorists. The problem is that the system also sweeps innocent U.S. citizens into its net, collecting data from phone calls and e-mails. Harris chronicles the rise and fall and revival of Poindexter (made infamous by his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal) and others, and the inherent contradictions of protecting American liberty by spying on U.S. citizens. He details the electronic tracking systems, the internecine conflicts between spy agencies, the complex of laws and regulations, and the political machinations that have resulted in the secret funding of this controversial operation. Harris sifts through a confusing array of acronyms, fascinating characters, and chilling operations to offer an absorbing look at modern spying technology and how it impacts average Americans. --Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (February 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202451
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202452
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #794,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shane Harris writes about electronic surveillance, intelligence, and counterterrorism for National Journal in Washington, D.C.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Connecting the Dots: A Timely Treatment of Global Terror and US Intel, January 16, 2010

By 

J. A. Walsh (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Soon after the man now variously known as the "underwear bomber," or even the "crotch bomber" attempted to blow up a Detriot-bound flight on Christmas Day, Americans became rapidly familiar with what Shane Harris' book outlines word-for-word: our intelligence system is very good at "collecting the dots," but not always very good at "connecting the dots."

In The Watchers, Harris goes on to take a very close look at the development of what the subtitle calls the American "surveillance state," particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and through the lens afforded by his access to John Poindexter, a former Reagan administration national security advisor and a director of the Information Awareness Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) during the George W. Bush, post-9/11 years.

As someone who was working in intelligence in a Defense Department capacity during this time period, I have to start with kudos for the accuracy and vividness with which Harris captures the kaleidoscopic speed of the changes in regulation and standard operating procedure during this time. Those of us in the field were left in a constant state of uncertainty as to what we might collect, on whom, and what could be done with it, notwithstanding the questions of with whom it could be shared, for what purposes and on whose orders.

While Harris keeps a pretty even keel, I think it is difficult to walk away from the book with anything but a sense that he disapproves of the liberties that were taken by the Bush administration and "the Watchers" - in the NSA, DIA, CIA and elsewhere - in infringing on civil liberties in the name of national security. Indeed, his conclusory chapters on the course reversal by President Obama's administration after candidate Obama's declarations only strengthened that perception for me. He clearly viewed Obama's vote on FISA in spring 2008 as a harbinger of the administration's intentions to be much less proactive than many civil libertarians, Bush critics and Obama supporters would have liked.

Still, he never quite delivers on the promise of proving that "the surveillance state" has risen in the US. Certainly the level of scrutiny to which Americans are subject to at the hands of their own government does not rise to the level of constant video monitoring of citizens that is widely accepted in the UK. Harris notes the distinction with the UK, which seems to beg a different answer to the question of whether we are approaching a "surveillance state" in the US.

Harris is surely not responsible for the editor's choice of subtitle, but there is nothing here that demonstrates that the US - in any way - is approaching the kind of generally benevolent (if often insidious) creep of surveillance that came into Brits' lives after World War II, during the Troubles and since 9/11. Nor does he even address the kind of misguided and anti-democratic intelligence infrastructure that operated behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and in places like Iran, North Korea and other oppressive regimes and true "surveillance states."

In other words, he has a wealth of information on how the US has made it possible to collect a lot more info on its citizens, but he does not have any evidence to prove that there is a strain of modern McCarthyism or other misguided or unethical or secret intention behind the plan -- something I would think is a strong indicator of the true rise of a surveillance state. People may disagree strongly on what's been done and they may think that John Woo and Dick Cheney have trounced the Constitution; but, Harris provides no information or inference to assert that they did so with some nefarious intention directed at American citizens. Rather, he thinks they have beenn terribly misguided in an earnest effort at improving national security.

Another of the book's weaknesses is in Harris' tendency to pursue tangents that are too remote to be enjoyable for anyone but the most obsessed intel junkies. One segment of the book on the actual computer software that was being tested and used in certain projects and the problems inherent in deploying it is so deep into the weeds it detracts from the larger narrative. Then again, I found a brief detour into the Achille Lauro hijacking - and even the footnotes on it - to be fascinating, so the criticism may be more a matter of taste.

That said, Harris has certainly produced as comprehensive an examination of these topics as could be expected while relying essentially on the information provided from his extensive interviews with Poindexter and the follow-ups and research that sprang from that central narrative. And, the work could not be more timely. Harris spends much of the book discussing Poindexter's (and others') efforts to develop a system of total information awareness (TIA) that might collect, assimilate and analyze information to provide predictive intelligence that could preempt attacks, in many ways the kind of discussion that has proceeded from the Christmas Day bombing attempt (although, in that case, the government had variously collected but not connected specific information about the perpetrator as opposed to casting a net and dragging for any general information to analyze and integrate as the TIA system would).

Harris' research notes demonstrate the exhaustive work he put in as a journalist throughout this period, and he derives great benefit for the book. His discussion of the political and bureaucratic wrangling over FISA and the question of domestic wiretapping provides a very realistic look at the nature of the back room and power broker discussions that were happening as the White House anointed the NSA with new powers and wrangled with Congress over the meaning of the existing law and the intent of the legislation as now viewed through the post-9/11 lens.

From an operational standpoint, Harris does a nice job of outlining some of the administrative hurdles that frustrate effective intelligence: from information sharing and useful aggregation for analysis to logistical challenges (what to do about variable spellings of transliterated names) and legal questions. The book is strictly an analysis of signal intelligence and intel analysis and does not really touch on the incredible difficulty inherent collecting human intelligence in this particular conflict, because of the marked and insurmountable cultural differences between the West and the radicalized Islamist groups that are training and mobilizing many of the attackers.

In that sense I think that the book gives short shrift to the true meaning of the term "surveillance," and tends to overstate the ascendancy of it in practice. After all, surveillance has been happening since ancient times as the etymology of the term "eavesdropping" indicates, and clandestine gathering and strategic analysis of information gleaned was a part of the rise of the American state as a fitful colony, a divided republic and a Cold War empire -- all long before satellites came to circle in space and send signals back to Ft Mead.

It will be interesting to see where Harris' book winds up in posterity and only the continuing development of the story of American intelligence and the War on Terror can really dictate that, but - for now - he has produced a well-researched and insightful analysis of a government system that is under much scrutiny and has garnered much publicity in the weeks leading up to the book's release.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile, if Poindexter-centric, April 5, 2010

By 

David from San Diego - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State (Hardcover)

I had expected this book to be an overview of the mechanisms by which the United States has become a surveillance state, and had even hoped that it would provide historical insights into how surveillance states inevitably become police states.

That was not this book. It seemed to be written mostly from the perspective of Admiral John Poindexter (USN Ret.), and did not get too much into the details of how the government monitors us. (There was NO mention of misuse of information by government agencies.)

It was worth my time, but I am still waiting for someone to write the book that I had hoped this would be.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same, March 19, 2010

By 

Frederick S. Goethel "wildcatcreekbooks" (Central Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Several things leapt out at me as I read this book. The first is how well the book is written. Unlike many books about national security and intelligence, this is actually readable without having to be an expert in the field. Most are so technical and dry that it is nearly impossible to sit down and read them enjoyably, while this reads in a manner that reminds me of a novel.

The second thing that is that, despite spending tens of billions of dollars, breaking the law by collecting data illegally and increasing the amount of intelligence information by an alarming magnitude, we are no closer to actually being able to use computers to analyze this data than we were 30 years ago. The computers in use today can siphon of incredible amounts of data, and are doing just that, but the ability to analyze that data still takes numerous human technicians and days of research. So, despite all the research and breaches of privacy of American citizens, we really are no safer than we were in the days and weeks before 9/11.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the national security picture, as well as anyone who is concerned about the civil liberties of all Americans.