We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America

by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Overview

This is the story of surveillance in Britain and the United States, from the detective agencies of the late nineteenth century to 'wikileaks' and CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden in the twenty-first. Written by prize-winning historian and intelligence expert Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, it is the first full overview of its kind.

Delving into the roles of credit agencies, private detectives, and phone-hacking journalists as well as agencies like the FBI and NSA in the USA and GCHQ and MI5 in the UK, Jeffreys-Jones highlights malpractices such as the blacklist and illegal electronic interceptions. He demonstrates that several presidents - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon - conducted various forms of political surveillance, and also how British agencies have been under a constant cloud of suspicion for similar reasons.

Continuing with an account of the 1970s leaks that revealed how the FBI and CIA kept tabs on anti-Vietnam War protestors, he assesses the reform impulse of this era - an impulse that began in America and only gradually spread to Britain. The end of the Cold War further at the end of the 1980s then undermined confidence in the need for state surveillance still further, but it was to return with a vengeance after 9/11.

What emerges is a story in which governments habitually abuse their surveillance powers once granted, demonstrating the need for proper controls in this area. But, as Jeffreys-Jones makes clear, this is not simply a story of the Orwellian state. While private sector firms have sometimes acted as a brake on surveillance by the state (particularly in the electronic era), they have also often engaged in dubious surveillance practices of their own. Oversight and regulation, he argues, therefore need to be universal and not simply concentrate on the threat to the individual posed by the agencies of government.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198749660
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2017
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is Emeritus Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, the Free University of Berlin, and Toronto. The founder of the Scottish Association for the Study of America, of which is he the current honorary president, he has also published widely on intelligence history, including The CIA and American Democracy (1989), The FBI: A History (2007), and In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence , the last of these also published by Oxford University Press (2013). He was the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize for the best UK book on American politics with The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society (2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 A Survey of Surveillance
Chapter 2 The Private Eye Invades Our Privacy
Chapter 3 The Blacklist
Chapter 4 Franklin D. Roosevelt's Incipient Surveillance State
Chapter 5 McCarthyism in America
Chapter 6 McCarthyism in Britain
Chapter 7 COINTELPRO and 1960s Surveillance
Chapter 8 An Age of Transparency
Chapter 9 The Intensification of Surveillance Post-9/11
Chapter 10 Private-Sector Surveillance in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 11 Snowden
Chapter 12 Policy and Reform in the Obama-Cameron Era
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

03/20/2017
Despite Jeffreys-Jones’s impressive credentials (he is an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and the author of In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence), this survey of the history and current state of surveillance in the U.S. and U.K. disappoints. Its main value for American readers will be its review of how differently the American and British governments have handled the familiar tensions of balancing security and freedom. The author focuses on what he terms the “understudied phenomenon of private surveillance,” though many recent books have also looked at how companies use consumer data, which is often obtained covertly. His conclusions are unsurprising: “where governments possess surveillance powers they will, eventually, abuse them,” and private companies sometimes also “exploit the techniques of surveillance in an abusive manner.” Some digressions detract from the central focus, such as a passage about the rise in the use of private eyes for divorce work during the 20th century. Idiosyncratic writing (“Nixon’s bugging of Watergate headquarters prompted Mao Zedong to raise his Red eyebrow”) makes for unnecessary distraction. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"In this outstanding, brief overview of the history of surveillance and debates surrounding it in the UK and US, University of Edinburgh academic Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones challenges head-on Orwell's representation of the secret state in his celebrated dystopian novel... overall, the author has presented a convincing critique of Orwellian statism." Richard Lance Keeble, George Orwell Studies Vol. 2, No.1 2017

From the Publisher

06/15/2017
Jeffreys-Jones's (emeritus history, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland; In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence) authoritative survey of mass surveillance in Britain and America is an antidote to conspiracy-speak and its toxic effect on our perceptions of government and private-sector intelligence. The complicated history—worsened by the Cold War and 9/11—of abuse and justice behind official policies, claims the author, calls for universal regulation and oversight, instead of scattering energies and budgets addressing individual concerns over cybermanipulation and even mind control. Most surprising is evidence that more lives are harmed daily by aggressive corporate misuse of credit data, employment histories (used for labor-market blacklisting), vacuuming of Internet searches, and social media snoops than an Orwellian Big Brother. Government agencies on both sides of the pond are burning through experts racing to defeat data-encryption keys more advanced than those in the hands of the FBI, NSA, and Britain's equivalents GCHQ and MI5. The resultant anxieties and tensions afflict whole populations and—as ever—big money controls big data. VERDICT A valuable book for anyone seeking a sober, if densely written, overview of the gap between defenders of privacy and defenders of national security, and how both are threatened by private-sector exploitation.—William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

Library Journal

2017-05-02
Evenhanded account of society's persistent embrace of surveillance for security and control.Jeffreys-Jones (Emeritus, American History/Univ. of Edinburgh; The American Left, 2013, etc.) views this controversial topic with a historian's dispassionate curiosity, noting that governmental surveillance can be justified due to terrorism, while for-profit spying often goes unquestioned. "The growing dangers of private surveillance are real," he writes, "and tend to be overlooked or subordinated to fears of state surveillance." The author uses historical narrative to demonstrate this insidious dynamic. In both the United States and Britain, 19th-century conflict between labor movements and robber-baron industrialists birthed early attempts at comprehensive surveillance, epitomized by the growth of detective services like the Pinkertons, who infiltrated radical miners' groups, leading to "a low point in the reputation of the private eye." In Britain, World War I spy services spawned a professionalized blacklisting industry, providing leverage over a restive working class: "Union troublemakers were identified through their activities, by means of scrutinizing the union and local press, and with the assistance of a league of informers." Jeffreys-Jones claims that the blacklisting of one element of a broader attack on labor is an "unofficial collaboration with the government." The supposedly populist Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a nascent security state in collaboration with J. Edgar Hoover before Pearl Harbor, spurred by the 1938 uncovering of a Nazi spy ring. The author also examines the creeping excess in America of the McCarthy and COINTELPRO periods as well as their less-known equivalents in Britain; in both nations, citizens "were willing to accept transgressions against privacy and civil liberties." While the 1970s saw a pivot toward protecting individual rights—and a congressional investigation of CIA excess—post-9/11 technologies and fears have surely eroded that progress. Jeffreys-Jones closes with an exploration of Edward Snowden's "personal set of principles," tying together these complex themes with a style that is lucid and approachable and only occasionally dry. Academic history light on bombast, with clear relevance to our current unsettled moment.

Kirkus Reviews