32 books like No Place to Hide

This book taught me the meaning of the word “totalitarianism.” It’s like a horror movie you can’t escape from, but instead of a zombie fungus eating your mind, it’s the state controlling every little aspect of your life, down to—and worst of all—the words that you think with, and therefore what you can even conceive of.

Few books have stayed in my mind like this one. Even today—or more than ever—its images come to my mind over and over again when I see what is happening in America and the world.

Before reading Zuboff, I tended to think of surveillance only in terms of government surveillance. Zuboff showed me how wrong that was. I learned that corporations conduct as much, if not more, surveillance than governments. What’s more, corporations also collaborate with governments, which expands the overall surveillance apparatus to frightening degrees. 

Zuboff convincingly shows how seemingly unrelated phenomena came together to change capitalism. I learned that Google and Facebook created the framework for surveillance capitalism by combining behavioral psychology with data collection and advertising practices.

These tech giants are not interested in serving free citizens; they are interested in creating docile consumers. While Snowden first showed me the dangers of government surveillance, Zuboff showed me that corporate surveillance may be even more dangerous. 

I read Bamford’s work because I wanted to understand the history of the NSA, and I was not disappointed. I loved learning, in excruciating detail, about the surveillance techniques and programs of the NSA before the internet. 

This book shattered my impression that the NSA was a responsible agency that turned “bad” during the War on Terror. Bamford showed me that modern-day NSA mass surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, actually represents the normal workings of the NSA rather than merely being an aberration. The most important lesson, though, was that the NSA has worked so hard to suppress the public use of encryption, the most important anti-surveillance technology we have.  

Changing careers from publishing to tech is a path not often traveled. Wiener made this jump from a world legendary for its light pay compensated by romanticism, to an industry best known for generous “perks that landed somewhere between the collegiate and the feudal.” Wiener’s experience makes for one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in years—she is a gifted writer and unafraid to call out the over-seriousness of the tech bro mentality as an ultimately “dreary” worldview. 

Westin’s book completely blew me away the first time I read it. I felt like I had discovered a long-lost time capsule containing everything I needed to know about the technological and social changes that created the foundations for surveillance in the United States today. 

Since Edward Snowden, I tended to think about surveillance in terms of the internet and the National Security Agency. But Westin showed me that surveillance is much broader—socially and historically—than the NSA’s surveillance of the internet. Westin provided me with a template for analyzing surveillance.

Westin distinguishes physical surveillance from data surveillance, and he examines the difference between corporate and government surveillance. Most importantly, I found his recommendations for protecting privacy in the face of increased surveillance powers incredibly relevant even today. 

I read this book because I studied the cypherpunks, and I found Burnham’s work cited in one of the cypherpunk’s essays. It was published in 1983, but I felt like it could have been published today. I was met with surprises on every page. I had to rethink the nature of surveillance itself. 

Written in the wake of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s, Burnham taught me that the computerization of society—with its increasingly networked systems and exponentially growing databases—is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual rights.

Even everyday things we now take for granted, like direct deposit and paying with debit cards, feed the surveillance machine. When governments and corporations coordinate to watch us all, we cease to be free citizens and become more like consumers on probation. 

Somehow, I’d never heard of the crime The Burglary details: the 1971 burglary of FBI field offices. And somehow, the burglars remained anonymous for decades.

A reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time, Medsger was one of journalists who received copies of the FBI files stolen by three professors, a daycare worker, a social worker, and others who called themselves The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. The stolen files exposed COINTELPRO and other illegal FBI investigations, and fundamentally altered the FBI.

The Burglary told me the value of detailed research, especially relating a 50-year-old crime, and showed me the essential importance of understanding the society surrounding the crime in order to fully comprehend the crime.

A positive NY Times review “in brief” of this “journey through the Deep State” caught my attention and mind immediately.

Most political scientists and top-tier journalists, like Ms. Howley, want no part of any association with the “deep state,” yet here was Hawley straying from the usual tone of dismissal, disdain, or stigma about the idea.

As I started reading about Reality Winner’s harrowing experience, I first thought I had mistakenly taken it for non-fiction. In fact, Winner’s name and her experiences are all too real. If there is any paranoia in Winner’s encounter with the deep state, it is to be found in the darker world of the national security state, not Hawley or her subject.

This is one book I really could not leave alone. An experienced political journalist loses his sister in a road accident, but the journalist thinks her death has something to do with some government secrets she knew about.

I was drawn into this story from the start. Peston’s style is first person central and it holds the readers attention. He turns what could be a simple plot into a complicated plot with the main protagonist digging out secrets while risking his own life. I loved this one. There are a lot of very realistic passages from a writer well-schooled in the political world.

This is a memoir by a former narcotics agent who writes about a major drug importation masterminded by a combination of crooks and cops (though it is hard sometimes to work out who was who!).

On a broader scale, Operation Jungle also details the high-level corruption which existed in Queensland under disgraced senior police and politicians in league with each other. Shobbrook – as a brave, serving narcotics agent who transferred into the Australian Federal Police – “ratted” on the corrupt police and politicians before the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs, and so sealed his fate.

Australia was not ready for the truth. Instead of treating his evidence with respect, the author was forced out of the Australian Federal Police in 1980. It’s a gripping, thrilling true story.