Democracy Betrayed: The Rise of the Surveillance Security State

Readers of similarly themed books, such as James Risen’s outstanding Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, will find little new information or analysis here. Keller (The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover), former director of the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, offers a familiar thesis: that the post-9/11 steps taken to ensure homeland security have instead threatened Americans’ liberties. Keller correctly notes that the odds of an American falling victim to a terrorist attack are much smaller than is often perceived, but his arguments discount the fears the prospect of such attacks understandably engender. As a consequence, his warnings about the assault on privacy and civil liberties will be viewed as tone-deaf by those not already persuaded of his central premise. Keller writes as if he invented the term “the Security Industrial Complex,” though that phrase, riffing on President Eisenhower’s phrase “the military-industrial complex,” dates back to at least 2004; the suggestion that he is pioneering arguments pervades the book. He concludes with the laudable aspiration that the “great arc of history” not record “the demise of the open society,” but without affording a plausible case that government intrusion into private lives will be reduced anytime soon. (Jan.)