You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
Athan Theoharis, long a respected authority on surveillance and secrecy, established his reputation for meticulous scholarship with his work on the loyalty security program developed under Truman and McCarthy. In Abuse of Power, Theoharis continues his investigation of U.S. government surveillance and historicizes the 9/11 response. Criticizing the U.S. government's secret activities and policies during periods of "unprecedented crisis," he recounts how presidents and FBI officials exploited concerns about foreign-based internal security threats. Drawing on information sequestered until recently in FBI records, Theoharis shows how these secret activities in the World War II and Cold War eras expanded FBI surveillance powers and, in the process, eroded civil liberties without substantially advancing legitimate security interests. Passionately argued, this timely book speaks to the costs and consequences of still-secret post-9/11 surveillance programs and counterintelligence failures. Ultimately, Abuse of Power makes the case that the abusive surveillance policies of the Cold War years were repeated in the government's responses to the September 11 attacks.
During his forty-eight years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover scrupulously maintained secret office files and arranged for special filing procedures to safeguard "sensitive" information.
Provides an overview of FBI developments and personalities, looking at important cases, policy decisions, media portrayals, and relationships with the president, Congress, and other law enforcement agencies.
"Chasing Spies" confirms that professionalism and accountability are part of the FBI's long history. The book suggests that the FBIUs request for added powers of surveillance in a time of national emergency demands careful scrutiny.
None
Was J. Edgar Hoover a homosexual? And did organized-crime leaders, knowing this, blackmail the FBI director into leaving them alone? These charges won almost instant popular acceptance when they were aired not long ago in a sensational biography of Hoover. But Athan Theoharis, our foremost authority on Hoover and the FBI, here shows that the accusations are spurious, and that the story of Hoover's real approach to sex and organized crime is far more intriguing. The chilling portrait that takes shape in these pages is that of a moralistic bureaucrat who would not hesitate to use sex-related information against his political enemies - but only when it could not be traced to FBI investigations....
The role of the police has, from its beginnings, been ambiguous, even janus-faced. This volume focuses on one of its controversial aspects by showing how the police have been utilized in the past by regimes in Europe, the USA and the British Empire to check political dissent and social unrest. Ideologies such as anti-Communism emerge as significant influences in both democracies and dictatorships. And by shedding new light on policing continuities in twentieth-century Germany and Italy, as well as Interpol, this volume questions the compatibility of democratic government and political policing.
This book is a comprehensive history of the abuses of the American domestic intelligence system from 1936 until May 1978. Drawing from the mountain of bureaucratic memos that Congressional committees and the Freedom of Information Act have pried loose, the author traces the step-by-step expansion of the authority of the FBI and other agencies to investigate the loyalty of American citizens exercising their civil liberties. In the process, he also shows the daily Washington struggle of top-level bureaucrats for power and programs. -- from Publisher description.
Hunting down America's public enemies was just one of the FBI's jobs. Another—perhaps more vital and certainly more covert—was the job of promoting the importance and power of the FBI, a process that Matthew Cecil unfolds clearly for the first time in this eye-opening book. The story of the PR men who fashioned the Hoover era, Branding Hoover's FBI reveals precisely how the Bureau became a monolithic organization of thousands of agents who lived and breathed a well-crafted public relations message, image, and worldview. Accordingly, the book shows how the public was persuaded—some would say conned—into buying and even bolstering that image. Just fifteen years after a theater impresar...