“Actually, a Hydra conspiracy would be less disturbing”: a national security reading list

shinelikethunder:

wintercyan:

shinelikethunder:

I did not deliberately set out to make my past few months’ nonfiction reading into a rec list for a more in-depth look at the political issues addressed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Honest. (Mostly honest. The Paperclip book might’ve caught my eye in part because of the shoutout in Cap 2.) But one of the reasons I fell in love with the movie was the great big middle finger it gave the American national-security complex… and then when I was tumbling ever further down the nonfiction rabbit hole and things started sounding eerily familiar, I realized, duh, the scriptwriters for TWS were probably reading a lot of the same books I was. 

I don’t make any claim that this is an exhaustive list. As noted, it’s a straight-up list of books I’ve picked up recently, so I have no doubt there are other relevant ones I’m missing. But it’s a pretty solid overview. So without further ado, I give you: the “Actually, a Hydra conspiracy would be less disturbing” national security reading list. 

• Jane Mayer – The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. 

• Tom Engelhardt – Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

• Dana Priest and William Arkin – Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.

• Annie Jacobsen – Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America.

More detailed writeups and a bit of a rant under the read-more link. (Gist of the rant: The best and scariest thing about Cap 2 is that the most disturbing things about SHIELD/Hydra are 100% based in fact.)

Keep reading

For those with an interest in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I’d add Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth to this list.

Coming back to this list, I’d also like to add Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. Schneier is no paranoid crank or partisan hack; he’s been a well known, widely respected computer security expert since the mid-late 90s, and he has a knack for distilling very technical issues down to the essentials of what it all means and why it matters. He’s also a reliably lucid voice on broader issues of security, risk, fear, the establishment of trust, and the foundations of civil society.

I’m telling you all this because the apocalyptic wasteland described in this book, which will make you want to flush your phone down the toilet and never drive or take public transit anywhere ever again, is actually a pretty restrained take on the situation from a guy who knows what he’s talking about and understands the needs, stakes, and motivations of all parties involved.

(Notably, Schneier does not encourage you to flush your phone down the toilet, or up stakes and move to a bunker in Montana. Part of his point is that if seeing the very tip of the data-exploitation iceberg makes you feel like you have to, something is horribly out of whack and there’s no actual reason Certain Parties need to be given unfettered, unsupervised access to every single thing they ask for.)

Zola’s algorithm is already out there, more versions of it than anyone knows how to count, ticking away in the cloud. To paraphrase a different Schneier quote, it’s bad civic hygiene to sit around waiting for someone to decide that building death helicarriers out of it would be a great way to keep the world safe.