It’s always good to know if you’re suspicious to the government. For a quick diagnosis, take this handy quiz based on my novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall.
For more dystopian fun, play Watched Sweeper — an HTML5 game about surveillance!
It’s easy to feel a bit of information overload when you first learn about an information leak revealing that the NSA has spied on regular American citizens and that major Internet companies like Microsoft and Facebook have helped them do it.
Glenn Greenwald is the reporter who read through countless documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and wrote the first news articles bringing that information to the public’s attention.
Now, with his excellent book No Place to Hide, Greenwald offers an insightful and comprehensive discussion of the controversial documents. Greenwald clearly lays out the most significant revelations and why they matter to everyday people.
The first part reads like a spy novel, grabbing the reader from the first page with an exciting account of how Snowden first contacted Greenwald, their secret meeting in Hong Kong, and the ensuing behind-the-scenes drama to get the information into the newspapers. While some have criticized the Snowden leak as threatening national security, the book highlights the care and scrutiny with which Greenwald and his collaborator Laura Poitras handled the classified documents, seeking to shine light without putting anyone’s lives in danger.
The next two sections contain less narrative, spending more time explaining the most significant revelations and why surveillance is harmful to society. While they don’t read quite as fast as the thrilling opening, these parts are great for anyone who had trouble keeping up with the Snowden leaks and what they meant.
Greenwald closes with a critical and thought-provoking discussion of the American media and what he perceives as journalists’ growing sympathy to the government. In Greenwald’s view, journalism has lost its investigative edge, giving too much power to the government to decide what information is published — and perhaps more critically — what information is not.
As a journalist, I found this section fascinating. While it paints a dismal picture of corporate media, the book’s existence provides optimism for the rise of independent journalists to maintain the mantle of the Fourth Estate.
Adam Bender is a tech journalist and the author of two dystopian novels about government surveillance. You can find his books WE, THE WATCHED and DIVIDED WE FALL at most major online bookstores.
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I’ve got a pretty exciting update. We, The Watched is getting a brand new cover. And this time it’s professional.
The new cover was designed by Belinda Pepper over at Red Swallow Design. The basic design is a modification of the previous cover, but instead of the CCTV camera, it features the fire-eyed graffiti tag of the secret rebel organization known as the Underground.
For those of you keeping track, this is now the third cover for We, The Watched since it was first published a few years ago. However, the more important thing to remember is that it’s the coolest. By far.
“But that’s not all!”
There was a very important reason for designing a new cover: We, The Watched is finally getting a print version! This freshly revised edition will be sold through CreateSpace and available on Amazon from the start. There’s still a little more work to do before it’s up for sale (these things take time), but I’m shooting to have it ready for purchase in the next several weeks. Stay tuned to this blog for the announcement.
But don’t worry, eBook fans, I have not forgotten you. I have also gone ahead and updated the eBook version to include the new cover, more eye-catching formatting and minor revisions made for the print edition. You can get the Kindle version on Amazon or the ePub version (for all other eReaders) on Smashwords right now!
The latest eBook will be rolling out to Apple, Sony, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers over the next few weeks. If you have already purchased We, The Watched online, depending on the store you should be able to download the new version for free (if not, please contact me).
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The current debate over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, PRISM, highlights a great conundrum for citizens of any country: How much personal privacy should one give up in exchange for better national security?
When I wrote my novel We, The Watched and its upcoming sequel Divided We Fall, I imagined a dystopian nation in which the government had used national security as an excuse to take all privacy rights from the people. That’s not the case today, but it’s one possible outcome if the balance swings too far in one direction.
With every call, social media update or credit card transaction, people leave behind a long trail of data that can potentially be stored and analyzed by businesses and the government. The digitization of video and an increasing number of surveillance cameras potentially adds even more data to mix.
Evolving tools for big data analysis provide an ability to parse and make sense of all this information like never before. This technology can be used for good and keep people safe, but like any great power it can be abused without the right privacy checks in place.
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