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The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All
by Arthur Holland Michel
The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens.
Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen.
In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens.
Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.
"[A]n informative and persuasive look at how society might regulate cutting-edge technology to assure both individual privacy rights and the government's ability to guard public safety." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A skilled, mildly alarmist overview of another dazzling if intrusive technology." - Kirkus Reviews
"A groundbreaking book about the promise and peril of wide-area motion imagery on and off the battlefield. Arthur Holland Michel's thoughtful and probing work calls for urgent consideration of the rapidly expanding uses - public and private - of automatic surveillance technology." - Linda Robinson, author of One Hundred Victories
"On almost every page, Eyes in the Sky offers astonishing details that seem to belong in science fiction. But they're true. The same technology can be used to battle forest fires or literally track your every move. Can we control these machines? As Arthur Holland Michel makes clear in this riveting and important book, we now have a choice: confront the threat or sacrifice our basic freedoms." - Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control
This information about Eyes in the Sky was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Arthur Holland Michel is a journalist, researcher, and founder/codirector of the Center for the Study of the Drone. Arthur has written for Wired, Al Jazeera America, Vice, U.S. News, Fast Company, Motherboard, The Verge, Bookforum, and the New York Daily News, among others. He is a coauthor of The Drone Primer: A Compendium of Key Issues, and Drone Sightings and Close Encounters in the National Airspace.
Libby Lost and Found
by Stephanie Booth
Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.
You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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