Listeners

This book provides an in depth view of wiretapping throughout the history of the United States in order to try providing a context for the issues we see today. A lens through which we should interpret the way we exist today and consider the act of listening in on someone else's contents. I was surprised that it stopped at 9/11 for being a book that came out in 2022, but I see the intention and actually appreciate the fact that it gave a deep dive into the way we perceived surveillance prior to 9/11, an undeniable seismic shift that caused most of us to have a sense of amnesia about the way things were before whether that's surveillance, travel, policing, etc. Books like this are important for the way that they give us a cultural understanding of the "dirty work" of surveillance.