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does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on?
And is the interception of communication an effective means
of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some
of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s
brilliant new book, Chatter.
In the late 1990s,
when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories
about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that
spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed
America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls
and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world.
Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe
explores the nature and context of communications interception,
drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative
reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result
is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part
travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital
age.
Chatter
starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station
covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s
Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to
another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback;
from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European
Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security
Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
As Keefe chases
down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence
agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and
introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable
characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now
listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence
translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation
to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member
of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight
is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for
the travel.
Provocative, often
funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter
is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast
implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is
also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction.
Patrick Radden Keefe was a Marshall Scholar
and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A
third-year student at Yale Law School, he has written for
The New York Review of Books, The Yale Journal
of International Law, Legal Affairs, and Slate.
This is his first book.
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