The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Polical Intelligence System

From the Red Scare of World War I to the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, an intense, clandestine (and often illegal) campaign was mounted against American citizens by key elements of their own government. The official name for this was "political intelligence" or "surveillance," but its real purpose was the restriction and suppression of all forms of political dissent and of movements for social change. The result, as noted civil liberties attorney Frank J. Donner conclusively proves in this exhaustively researched book, was the institutionalization of surveillance as " a mode of governance," a self-perpetuating system of political control.