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Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World Paperback – Illustrated, October 7, 2014

by Tom Engelhardt (Author), Glenn Greenwald (Foreword)

4.3 190 ratings

Part of: TomDispatch Books (5 books)

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In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn't have recognized.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Tom Engelhardt is an iconoclast, but he also is the latest exemplar of a great American tradition. Like George Seldes and I. F. Stone before him, he has bypassed conventionally minded newspapers and magazines, and with his remarkable website and in books like this, found a way of addressing readers directly about the issues central to our time. Again and again, he goes to the heart of the matter, drawing on his awesomely wide reading, his knowledge of history, and his acute political radar system that uncovers small but deeply revealing nuggets of news and often makes me feel, enviously: how could I have missed that?”
Adam Hochschild, author, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

"This is a book about secrets and surveillance, but I'm here to tell you one secret its contents won't. For more than a dozen years, Tom Engelhardt and his website or blog or postnewspaper wire service Tomdispatch.com have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the country's most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself. This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage."
Rebecca Solnit, author, Men Explain Things to Me

"Tom Engelhardt is an iconoclast, but he also is the latest exemplar of a great American tradition. Like George Seldes and I. F. Stone before him, he has bypassed conventionally minded newspapers and magazines, and with his remarkable website and in books like this, found a way of addressing readers directly about the issues central to our time. Again and again, he goes to the heart of the matter, drawing on his awesomely wide reading, his knowledge of history, and his acute political radar system that uncovers small but deeply revealing nuggets of news and often makes me feel, enviously: how could I have missed that?”
―Adam Hochschild, author, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

"This is a book about secrets and surveillance, but I'm here to tell you one secret its contents won't. For more than a dozen years, Tom Engelhardt and his website or blog or postnewspaper wire service Tomdispatch.com have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the country's most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself. This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage."
―Rebecca Solnit, author, Men Explain Things to Me

About the Author

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books; a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture; and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He lives in New York.

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for The Intercept and the author, most recently, of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Haymarket Books; Illustrated edition (October 7, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1608463656
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1608463657
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,442,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,895 in Political Intelligence
- #2,074 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
- #5,880 in History & Theory of Politics

Customer Reviews:
4.3 190 ratings

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Glenn Greenwald
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Glenn Greenwald is the author of several bestsellers, including How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. His most recent book is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America's top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and is now a founding editor of a new media outlet, The Intercept. He is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and various other television and radio outlets. He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I. F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
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Tom Engelhardt
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Customers find the book compelling and informative. They appreciate its well-researched content and clear writing style. Readers praise the book's educational value and consider it an important treatise on the rise of security agencies.

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26 customers mention "Readability"20 positive6 negative

Customers find the book well-written and engaging. They appreciate the clear presentation of information about the rise of security agencies. The satire and imagery are also appreciated.

"...It is a clear headed insightful telling of the story of where America's government has gone in the now existing creation of National Security State;..." Read more

"I write this a lot in my reviews, but this is an important book...." Read more

"Excellent book. Engelhardt demonstrates we have moved from a "national security state" to a "national surveillance state"...." Read more

"...use of the word "and" to begin a sentence makes this not a worthwhile and informative read." Read more

14 customers mention "Education value"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and insightful. It provides good background research and a great synopsis of how we got here. Readers appreciate the powerful analysis and well-written explanations. Overall, it's a great introduction to an important subject.

"...titled a Tom Engelhardt Reader; it is a collection of revised and updated articles from TomDispatch.com. "..." Read more

"This is a very informative book and would have been 5 star until it was politicized at the end. I still am glad I read it." Read more

"Excellent elucidation of the under-the-table development and rise to prominence of the secrecy-intelligence state since WW2, and particularly since..." Read more

"...al., this is a great introduction." Read more

4 customers mention "Writing quality"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the writing quality. They find it well-written and enjoyable despite the bad news. The book features top writers, and the clarity is outstanding.

"...His clarity is outstanding, he tells i like it is which in today's realm of journalism is getting rarer and rarer I am looking forward to reading..." Read more

"...It is very well written making it enjoyable in spite of the "bad news"...." Read more

"A great synopsis of how we got here. Well written and cogent. Yet thoroughly enjoyable and educational...." Read more

"...He does an incredible job explaining and giving evidence. Well written and argued. Highly recommend." Read more

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wsmrer
Doesn't suffer fools
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2014
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This book could have been titled a Tom Engelhardt Reader; it is a collection of revised and updated articles from TomDispatch.com.

"Doesn't suffer fools" is a title I jotted down when thinking about a title for the review of Tom Engelhardt's latest book. It calls up a personality type who has among its attributes seeing nonsense and hypocrisy and laying them to waste quickly and Engelhardt clearly has those qualities, but it also carries connotations of superiority and haughtiness, his work does not project that in any way.

It is a clear headed insightful telling of the story of where America's government has gone in the now existing creation of National Security State; the latest and complete dystopia that has developed beyond the Peoples' control and that of their elected representatives.
Those who can see what has happened are restricted from sharing the details with us for national security reasons; Engelhardt devotes a chapter to an impassioned call for insiders to breakout and do what Manning and Snowden did, reveal to the public what it needs to know about our very secrete government's actions; the legality of which is defined in secret documents we shall never be allowed to see.

Here are a few of his word on our Constitutional Law (Adjunct) Professor's role as assassin: "Mr. Obama must approve any name." (The kill list.)

"... thanks to such meetings--on what insiders have labeled "terror Tuesday"--assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked."
"...He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn't enough and that the CIA's drones can instead strike at suspicious "patterns of behavior" on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism, that can stop him."

Shadow Government was published before a recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has determined that fewer than 4 percent of drone strike casualties in Pakistan have been identified and confirmed through records as members of al-Qaeda. (http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/10/16/only-4-of-drone-victims-in-pakistan-named-as-al-qaeda-members/)
`Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group. Few corroborating details were available for those who were just described as militants. More than a third of them were not designated a rank, and almost 30% are not even linked to a specific group. Only 84 are identified as members of al Qaeda - less than 4% of the total number of people killed.
These findings "demonstrate the continuing complete lack of transparency surrounding US drone operations," said Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International.'

Engelhardt and many like him are working to try and keep the public informed of what is happening in the hope that at some point Americans may reflect that all is not as we are told by the press agents of the Survalience Security State; that we are not aimed at security but its opposite. To be able to see ourselves as others see us .... Don't miss this book.

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T. ORourke
Is our security network a bigger threat to us than the terrorists? Maybe.
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2016
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I write this a lot in my reviews, but this is an important book. It covers ground no one timid would cover, names names, and pulls few punches about how far out of control our national security apparatus is. It is seldom mentioned when discussing things like the Arab Spring and our dealing with Iran, but all of those countries were dominated by their security apparatus, what is often referred to as the deep government. These people don't change with elections, only massive coups, and no nascent democracy has yet been able to dismantle them without the country falling into chaos. That may not be cause and effect, but the link is strong. I have read several times that we are a turn-key totalitarian state waiting for someone to take over with malicious intent. It wouldn't take too much for those in the shadows to usurp the authority of the three branches of government. A chump demagogue like Trump would like to, but he is too incompetent and phony to get them behind him. Puppets like Romney or Paul Ryan have the potential, but they are too obviously chumps for the general electorate to fall for them.
That said, the main drawback of this book is its composition. It is edited essays compiled over time, and they repeat themselves often. It is a slim book that feels padded; I read it while at work (sometimes I am not busy) in three days and the redundancy was jarring. It worth putting up with it, as there is a lot to think and possibly despair about as our government tries to make it harder and harder to legally bring the transparency and responsibility for wrongdoing we the people deserve. Clearly most, if not all, of the money we spend on intelligence and security is wasted. The big question is if we can put the genie back in the bottle. Books like this are a start.

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S. Freeman
A brief and highly enlightening examination of government surveillance of the American people
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2015
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Excellent book. Engelhardt demonstrates we have moved from a "national security state" to a "national surveillance state". He also makes clear this has little to do with protecting U.S. citizens from terrorist attacks, and everything to do with the government keeping track of EVERYONE 24/7/52. Realizing just how much the government spies on its own citizens, and how hard it endeavors to keep everyone under constant surveillance is both sad and depressing. But the ruling oligarchy, unfortunately, understands, as they keep appropriating an ever greater percentage of the nation's wealth into their insatiably greedy pockets, and the remainder of the nation sees their standard of living consistently slipping lower and lower, at some point, it is going to be more than riots in Ferguson over a police shooting of a Black man. When discontent becomes pervasive, as Americans begin to wake up and understand fully what is being done to them just so the rich can have it all, "we, the people", are likely to become even more rebellious than almost any time in our nation's history. Understanding that, the oligarchy wants to militarize the police and wants the state to be able to identify and eliminate any "trouble makers" before massive resistance can be organized. At that point, we become the fascist police state the oligarchy dreams of. The more people who read Engelhardt, and other authors such as Stiglitz (for example, The Cost of Inequality), Suskind (e.g., The Way of the World), Bacevich (e.g. Washington Rules or The Limits of Power), Kuttner (e.g. Debtors' Prison), Stuckler (e.g. The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills), Graeber (e.g. Debt: The First 5,000 Years); Klein (e.g. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), Ravitch (e.g., Reign of Error), Blyth (e.g. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea), the better positioned we are to recognize the lies of Republicans in general, and "Democrats" like both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Once that happens, the possibility of meaningful change, of getting OUR country back on the track to genuine economic prosperity, and a rising standard of living begins to grow. Once the power of the oligarchy is broken, the "need" for the kinds of government surveillance Engelhardt discusses will cease to exist; and intelligence agencies and the police can return to the duties and responsibilities most Americans see as protecting and serving the people in general, those for whom they are supposed to work.

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Top reviews from other countries

Jack
A must
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2017
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An important book. If you are interested in America, this is a must read.

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Kuriosity . K . Kat
Secrets of people in power.
Reviewed in Canada on August 22, 2015
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For me this book was an eye opener to the workings of how people are securing their overall wellbeing and peace of mind In an ever changing world. I have to wonder why we have to eliminate people with drones and strike forces. Anyways the book gets me thinking and wondering if it is really legal and so on and so forth.

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John Raymond Boulanger
Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on January 5, 2017
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exellent read and downright scary !!

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Rod Howard
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2016
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excellent

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K M Sinsheimer
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2015
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Excellent

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