Democracy in the Dark
The Seduction of Government Secrecy
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- USD 27.99
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- USD 27.99
Descripción editorial
"A timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in" (The Washington Post).
From Dick Cheney's man-sized safe to the National Security Agency's massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government's modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the US Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI's effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide; the CIA's enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA's thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran–Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: How much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden.
Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz's Unchecked and Unbalanced, cowritten with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy.
"[An] important new book . . . Carefully researched, engagingly written stories of government secrecy gone amiss." —The American Prospect
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What the U.S. government should keep hidden from the American people is a legitimate question, but recent revelations about the CIA's torture of detainees and the NSA's warrantless mass surveillance suggest that American democracy is now threatened by the excesses of state secrecy. So argues author Schwarz, chief counsel at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice and former chief counsel to the Church Committee, the U.S. Senate's influential 1975 76 investigation into intelligence-service wrongdoing. Beginning by examining the rise of what he calls secrecy culture, Schwarz reaches back to debates over secrecy and transparency among the American Founding Fathers, then quickly jumps ahead to the dramatic growth of government and, in particular, executive power during the 20th century. He also considers the effectiveness of governmental and extra-governmental checks on potential abuses, covering whistle-blower Edward Snowden's revelations and the checkered record of Congress and the courts in reigning in the executive branch. The cumulative effect of this historical survey is to show that, in the post-9/11 United States, the balance between transparency and secrecy has overwhelmingly tipped toward secrecy. Timely and powerfully argued, this account by an exceptionally well-positioned observer and participant in the contentious history of government secrecy will prove a necessary addition to ongoing policy debates.
