We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America

Despite Jeffreys-Jones’s impressive credentials (he is an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and the author of In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence), this survey of the history and current state of surveillance in the U.S. and U.K. disappoints. Its main value for American readers will be its review of how differently the American and British governments have handled the familiar tensions of balancing security and freedom. The author focuses on what he terms the “understudied phenomenon of private surveillance,” though many recent books have also looked at how companies use consumer data, which is often obtained covertly. His conclusions are unsurprising: “where governments possess surveillance powers they will, eventually, abuse them,” and private companies sometimes also “exploit the techniques of surveillance in an abusive manner.” Some digressions detract from the central focus, such as a passage about the rise in the use of private eyes for divorce work during the 20th century. Idiosyncratic writing (“Nixon’s bugging of [the Democrats’] Watergate headquarters prompted Mao Zedong to raise his Red eyebrow”) makes for unnecessary distraction.[em] (June) [/em]