The Machine Never Blinks: A Graphic History of Spying and Surveillance

This stark warning about the digital scrutiny of contemporary lives opens with a Ralph Nader foreword fulminating against private industry spying on netizens (“Your information floats around the world in unseen hands”). But Greenberg (Surveillance in America) tends to be more focused on how systems of power curtail dissent. The first part of his illustrated history—whose line drawings are distractingly goofy and YA-oriented in a Larry Gonick–esque manner—reaches back to ancient times to show how stories like that of the Trojan horse explain methods of enacting and circumventing “social control.” The linkages aim for thought-provoking but founder, while his argument that “forms of surveillance in the Bible have paved the way for acceptance of surveillance in our modern lives” can be hard to swallow. Greenberg is on surer footing taking readers through government abuses of civil liberties via intrusive snooping in episodes on COINTELPRO, the McCarthy-era blacklist, and Occupy Wall Street. He arrives at a declaration that today’s CCTV-studded “security cities” and Panopticon-like social-media data mining are bad trade-offs (massive privacy loss for negligible security gain). While impassioned, Greenberg’s limited perspective (he only looks at America) and rushed edu-comic style too often trades analysis for fulmination.[em] (Mar.) [/em]