The Soft Cage
Christian Parenti

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A compelling, vitally important history lesson for everyone concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives. On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at a cash machine, visit the shopping centre, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail, logging your movements, schedules, habits, and political beliefs for government agencies and businesses to access.

As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance over the last two centuries in America - from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies - such as credit cards, website 'cookies', and electronic toll collection - that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century.

Welcome to the Machine
Derrick Jensen

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If the prospect of perpetual surveillance and psychological warfare alarms you, you are not alone. Most people would be disturbed if you told them that everything from their store purchases to their public transit rides are recorded and filed for government or corporate access. But more often than not, the smooth, silent cleanliness of its operation allows the Machine of Western Civilization to go unnoticed. In Welcome to the Machine, Jensen and Draffan draw our attention back to its eerie, persistent white noise and take a cold, hard, human look at the cultural conditions that have led us to all but surrender to its hum.