The God's Eye View (35 page)
Read The God's Eye View Online
Authors: Barry Eisler
CHAPTER 45
Turning a phone into a listening device via WARRIOR PRIDE and NOSEY SMURF (yes, they really have names like that—your tax dollars at work)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/
New exploit turns Samsung Galaxy phones into remote bugging devices
https://twitter.com/rj_gallagher/status/618543070884315136/photo/1
Using a cell phone’s gyroscopes like a microphone
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/gyroscope-listening-hack/
The $2.8 billion JLENS blimps floating over Maryland
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/17/billion-dollar-surveillance-blimp-launch-maryland/
The CIA/US Marshals joint cell phone tracking initiative
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-gave-justice-department-secret-phone-scanning-technology-1426009924
Accessing baby monitors and other listening devices
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/04/shodan-terrifying-search-engine/
Entertainment systems listening in on your living room conversations
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31296188
The NSA converts spoken words into searchable text so surveillance of conversations can be conducted at huge scale
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/
I wish I were inventing the phrase “civil liberties extremist,” as clear a sign of our authoritarian times as any. Alas, I’m not. Pity Barry Goldwater
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2015/may/18/obama-clinton-christie-politics-live
CHAPTER 46
Uber tracks user movements with a program called God View (aka Creepy Stalker View)
http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/19/uber-godview-tracking/
CHAPTER 47
“When you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/22/edward-snowden-nsa-reform
“We are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing.”
CHAPTER 49
Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden’s “off-the-record” interview gets live-tweeted
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/former-spy-chief-overheard-acela-twitter
Former NSA director Keith Alexander doesn’t cover his laptop webcam
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/03/do-webcams-watch-the-watchmen-ex-nsa-head-no-sticker
EPILOGUE
Not quite the “privacy advocate” position imagined in the book, but close enough: the president’s blue ribbon intelligence reform panel recommends “public interest advocate”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jan/08/must-counterterrorism-cancel-democracy/
Names change; programs continue
GENERAL READING
For more on the real-world events depicted in the prologue and in the novel generally, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014)
And Laura Poitras’s Oscar- and other award-winning documentary,
Citizenfour
A brief history of the US surveillance state
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724
Julian Assange’s
When Google Met WikiLeaks
(New York: OR Books, 2014)
Scott Horton’s
Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare
(New York: Nation Books, 2015)
For an overview of the ever-metastasizing international surveillance state, I recommend two great books:
Julia Angwin’s
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom In a World of Relentless Surveillance
(Times Books, 2014)
Bruce Schneier’s
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)
If you’d like some historical context for Edward Snowden’s actions and what the government has been trying to do to him, Judith Ehrlich’s and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award–nominated
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
is as illuminating as it is riveting
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
. . . . . . . .
Although I’m sure I came up short in various ways, I tried hard to accurately convey the experience of being hearing impaired. In this regard, I’m indebted to two authors:
Andrew Solomon, for
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
(New York: Scribner, 2012)
And Cece Bell, for her wonderfully evocative and moving graphic novel,
El Deafo
(New York: Amulet Books, 2014)
If you don’t think someone deaf could be as deadly as Manus, you must have missed Andrew Vachss’s Burke books, featuring Max the Silent, the last courier you would ever want to cross. Now you know . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Vachss/e/B000APBFC2
I’m not as technologically savvy as I’d like, which means this article by Micah Lee for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Encryption Works: How to Protect Your Privacy in the Age of NSA Surveillance,” was perfect for me. Thorough, understandable, and useful.
https://freedom.press/encryption-works
Another great Micah primer on how to keep your online communications private.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/14/communicating-secret-watched/
And from BeYourOwnReason: “Tightening your Security, Safeguarding Your Right to Privacy”
To the extent I get violence right in my fiction, I have many great instructors to thank, including Massad Ayoob, Tony Blauer, Wim Demeere, Dave Grossman, Tim Larkin, Marc MacYoung, Rory Miller, and Peyton Quinn. I highly recommend their superb books and courses for anyone who wants to be safer in the world, or just to create more realistic violence on the page:
http://www.massadayoobgroup.com
http://www.targetfocustraining.com
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com
Rex Bonomelli presented so many knockout design concepts it made me sad a book can only have one cover. But what a cover!
I like to listen to music while I write, and sometimes a certain band or album gets especially associated with what I’m working on. This time around, the band was Royal Jelly Jive. Listen to lead singer Lauren Michelle Bjelde belt out
Pterygophora
—the elegance of Nina Simone and the rough grit of Tom Waits, indeed.
Ali Watkins, Huffington Post political reporter, helped me better understand the arcane workings of the Senate while the two of us happened to be lurking outside the Room 219 SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) in the Hart Senate Office Building. And Mark Fallon and Steve Kleinman were also generous in sharing their experience from inside the SCIF (experience they’ve gained through tireless efforts to persuade American legislators that torture is a bad idea).
Thanks to Naomi Andrews, Judith Eisler, Blake Crouch, Barton Gellman, Dan Gillmor, Montie Guthrie, Mona Holland, Mike Killman, Lori Kupfer, Daniel Levin, Mark Steven Long, Genevieve Nine, Laura Rennert, Ken Rosenberg, Ted Schlein, Laura Schoeffel, Jennifer Soloway, Derek Thomas, Trevor Timm, and Alan Turkus for helpful comments on the manuscript.
Most of all, thanks to my wife, Laura, also mentioned above, for her help with the manuscript, who I really can’t thank enough. But I’m going to keep trying.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
. . . . . . . .
Photo © 2007 Naomi Brookner
Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. Eisler’s award-winning thrillers have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, have been translated into nearly twenty languages, and include the #1 bestseller
The Detachment
. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when he’s not writing novels, blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Learn more at
http://www.barryeisler.com
.