lightreads

The Watchers

3/5. History of various surveillance programs before and after 9/11, focusing on the politics and personalities more than the methods. Interesting and thorough as these things go, though it goes down a bit of a psychological rabbit hole with John Poindexter (yes, that one, this book actually starts with Iran-Contra for reasons that only become clear later). Still. Worth reading, if only for a reminder of just how bonkers this time period was, which is, in an odd way, comforting.

At War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

3/5. What it says on the tin, except with more diversions into corporate cybersecurity and the private side of the counter espionage industry than I was expecting. Fun background reading for me (I'm sort of orthogonal to the industry, long story), punctuated by "oh hey, it's that guy," and an occasional whistle at something particularly clever. E.g. the hacker who figured out how to pinpoint a server by remotely overclocking it to raise its temperature, which would imperceptibly change its timekeeping because physics, and then finding that clock that was the right microscopic amount off. Yikes.