Security Science

In 1983, Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, both serving life sentences at the U.S. Prison in Marion, Illinois, separately murdered two correction officers on the same day. The Bureau of Prisons condemned both men to the severest punishment that could legally be imposed, one created specifically for them. It was unofficially called "no human contact." Each initially spent nine months in a mattress-sized cell where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day. They were clothed only in boxer shorts, completely sealed off from the outside world with only their minds to occupy their time.

We live in an interconnected world, where security problems like terrorism are spilling across borders, and globalized data networks and e-commerce platforms are reshaping the world economy. This means that states' jurisdictions and rule systems clash. How have they negotiated their differences over freedom and security? Of Privacy and Power investigates how the European Union and United States, the two major regulatory systems in world politics, have regulated privacy and security, and how their agreements and disputes have reshaped the transatlantic relationship.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan.

The Nigerian prince eager to fork over his inheritance, the family friend stranded unexpectedly in Norway, the lonely Russian beauty looking for love...they spam our inboxes with their hapless pleas for help, money, and your social security number. In Dot Con, Veitch finally answers the question: What would happen if you replied?

For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade dominated the American scene, terrified politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands of our citizens. In this masterful history, Haynes Johnson re-creates that time of crisis. Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when fear again affects American behavior and attitudes.

A sobering and fascinating study on war in the modern era, Unrestricted Warfare carefully explores strategies that militarily and politically disadvantaged nations might take in order to successfully attack a geopolitical super-power like the United States. American military doctrine is typically led by technology; a new class of weapon or vehicle is developed, which allows or encourages an adjustment in strategy. Military strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argue that this dynamic is a crucial weakness in the American military.

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency’s secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA’s shrewdest operatives.

Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, teamed up to write this most convincing and readable guide, which illustrates the crucial link between Adam Smith's capitalism and the free society. They show how freedom has been eroded and prosperity undermined through the rapid growth of governmental agencies, laws, and regulations.

In this uncompromising investigation into today’s most urgent issues, Naomi Wolf uses her own wildly politicized pilgrimage—from New York Times bestselling author and high-level Democratic consultant to a journalist cast out from the elite political and social circles she once moved through—as a stunning narrative framework that is both chilling and incisive.

From the best-selling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves.

November 2009. Sergei Magnitsky is led to an isolation cell in a Moscow prison and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million in taxes. Magnitsky’s brutal killing has remained uninvestigated to this day. Red Notice is a searing exposé of the Russian authorities responsible for the murder, slicing deep into the heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths.

In The Plot to Betray America, New York Times best-selling author and renowned intelligence expert Malcolm Nance reveals exactly how President Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated, and eventually strategized to commit the greatest acts of treachery in the history of the United States: Compromising the presidential oath of office in exchange for power and personal enrichment.

Veteran CIA agent Kevin Shipp, who worked with all four Directorates of the agency, including protecting the head of the CIA, provides his perspective on how the agency has strayed so far from its original mission to provide accurate intelligence to the American president.

In You Can’t Joke About That, Kat Timpf shows why much of the way we talk about sensitive subjects is wrong. We’ve created all the wrong rules. We push ourselves into unnecessary conflicts when we should feel like we’re all in this together. When someone says “you can’t joke about that,” what they really mean is “this is a subject that makes people sad or angry.”

In Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know, Todd Sandler, one of America's leading scholars on the topic, provides a broad and example-rich overview of this perennially important issue. After clearly defining terrorism, he then discusses terrorism's causes, the nature of terrorist groups, how governments seek to counter terrorism, its economic consequences, and the future of terrorism.

In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology. Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of US espionage, gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies, and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight.

The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again. A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller Red Horizons, Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. to find his former spy chief and kill him. They failed.

A compendium of essential information for the modern security entrepreneur and practitioner. This audiobook provides essential direction for those who want to succeed in security, either individually or as part of a team. It also aims to stimulate some fresh ideas and provide new market routes for security professionals who may feel they are underappreciated and overexerted in traditional business domains.