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Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping
Random House
February 2005
320 pages ISBN: 1400060346 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
How 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.
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