Loading
Even as scandals over the US military’s domestic surveillance of civilians continue to surface today, Eyes in the Shadows reveals how this monitoring of citizens began more than a century ago. In this new origin story of the US surveillance state, Alexandre Rios-Bordes returns to the First World War, when two modest intelligence services—the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence—began spying on civilians. The book shows why and how this practice continued in peacetime, drawing the armed forces into the ongoing monitoring of the population. What processes and practices determine who warrants surveillance? What does it mean for a state to turn against certain citizens and groups and cast them as enemies? To answer these questions, Eyes in the Shadows describes surveillance in the making, immersing readers inside secretive organizations and showing how they operate—from collecting field data to writing reports and analyzing threats. The book offers unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of military vigilance, the shadow of which still looms over the present.
“This is the first comprehensive account of systematic state surveillance by the US military. Alexandre Rios-Bordes examines the development and deployment of military surveillance across four decades, but what particularly distinguishes this book is that it also considers the different features of surveillance that carry moral weight. Beautifully written, Eyes in the Shadows will appeal to all those who read Beverly Gage's G-Man on J. Edgar Hoover.”—Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870
“Eyes in the Shadows changes our understanding of when and how the US military began to spy on domestic dissidents. The book is not only meticulously researched, but also brilliantly analytical. It will reshape our understanding of the origins of the national security surveillance state.”—Kathryn Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11
"Cameras, eavesdropping, hackers: surveillance haunts contemporary imaginations. Rios-Bordes traces the genesis of these services in the American army around the time of the First World War: soldiers obtained, and then retained in peacetime, an inordinate power of investigation over their fellow citizens suspected of subversion, particularly Black and labor activists. This meticulous piece of work allows us to ask a question as old as suspicion: who watches those who watch?”—Le Monde