Surveillance Nation

We’ve been living in 1984 since 1941. That was the year the Justice Department first authorized the wiretapping of Americans. “We shudder to think of what its agents will do with this new authorization,” The Nation warned in an editorial that year.


Ever since then, our writers have investigated, exposed and denounced gross violations of our most basic civil liberties.


Now these articles have been collected in Surveillance Nation, a fascinating and timeless alternative history on the rise of the surveillance state. As our legal affairs correspondent, David Cole, writes in his introduction: “Time and again, writers for The Nation identified threats to privacy and liberty long before they were acknowledged by the broader public and media.”


Contributors to this important collection include Victor Navasky,  Diana Trilling, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Foner, Laura Flanders, Jonathan Schell, Naomi Klein, Christopher Hayes, Patricia Williams, Fred Cook, Frank Donner and Jaron Lanier.


Surveillance Nation is an intellectual and historical feast for anyone who wants to learn more about the kind of widespread abuses that Edward Snowden revealed in June 2013.