Technology has fractured democracy, and now there’s no going back. All around the world, the fringes have stormed the palace of the elites and unleashed data miners, dark ads and bots on an unwitting public. After years of soundbites about connecting people, the social media giants are only just beginning to admit to the scale of the problem. We stand on the precipice of an era where switching your mobile platform will have more impact on your life than switching your government. Where freedom and privacy are seen as incompatible with social well-being and transparency. Where your attention is sold to the highest bidder. Our laws don’t cover what is happening and our politicians don’t understand it. But if we don’t fight to change the system now, we may not get another chance.
Protecting the Vote When cybersecurity expert Jake Braun challenged hackers at DEFCON, the largest hacking conference in the world, to breach the security of an American voting machine, a hacker in Europe conquered the task in less than 2 minutes. From hacking into voting machines to more mundane, but no less serious problems, our democracy faces unprecedented tests from without and within. In Democracy In Danger, Braun, a veteran of 3 presidential campaigns and former White House Liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, reveals what the national security apparatus, local election administrators, and political parties have gotten wrong about election security and what America needs to do to protect the ballot box in 2020 and beyond.
For more than three hundred years, the world wrestled with conflicts that arose between nation-states. Nation-states wielded military force, financial pressure, and diplomatic persuasion to create "world order." Even after the end of the Cold War, the elements comprising world order remained essentially unchanged. But 2012 marked a transformation in geopolitics and the tactics of both the established powers and smaller entities looking to challenge the international community. That year, the US government revealed its involvement in Operation "Olympic Games," a mission aimed at disrupting the Iranian nuclear program through cyberattacks; Russia and China conducted massive cyber-espionage operations; and the world split over the governance of the Internet. Cyberspace became a battlefield. Cyber conflict is hard to track, often delivered by proxies, and has outcomes that are hard to gauge. It demands that the rules of engagement be completely reworked and all the old niceties of diplomacy be recast. Many of the critical resources of statecraft are now in the hands of the private sector, giant technology companies in particular. In this new world order, cybersecurity expert Adam Segal reveals, power has been well and truly hacked.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Explosive... A blistering tell-all."---Washington Post "People should sit up, take notes and change things."---Ace Smith, Los Angeles Times "Brazile most certainly has a story to tell.... Vivid."---The Guardian From Donna Brazile, former DNC chair and legendary political operative, an explosive and revealing new look at the 2016 election: the first insider account of the Russian hacking of the DNC and the missteps by the Clinton campaign and Obama administration that enabled a Trump victory. In the fallout of the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee--and as chaos threatened to consume the party's convention--Democrats turned to a familiar figure to right the ship: Donna Brazile. Known to millions from her frequent TV appearances, she was no stranger to high stakes and dirty opponents, and the longtime Democratic strategist had a reputation in Washington as a one-stop shop for fixing sticky problems. What Brazile found at the DNC was unlike anything she had experienced before--and much worse than is commonly known. The party was beset by infighting, scandal, and hubris, while reeling from a brazen and wholly unprecedented attempt by a foreign power to influence the presidential election. Plus, its candidate, Hillary Clinton, faced an opponent who broke every rule in the political playbook. Packed with never-before-reported revelations about what went down in 2016, Hacks is equal parts campaign thriller, memoir, and roadmap for the future. With Democrats now in the wilderness after this historic defeat, Hacks argues that staying silent about what went wrong helps no one. Only by laying bare the missteps, miscalculations, and crimes of 2016, Brazile contends, will Americans be able to salvage their democracy.
How much data does Facebook really have on me? What is a cookie on the Internet? Is my Amazon Alexa listening to me? Why can’t I seem to stop scrolling endlessly down my Instagram feed? Did social media really help cause an attempted coup in the United States? How did we go from short, 140-character tweets to attempted coups in less than two decades? How much data does Facebook really have on me? Is my Amazon Alexa listening to me? The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy demystifies these seemingly complex topics to help you understand how our very way of life is under threat and what you can do about it before it’s too late. Powered by your personal data, social media has transformed our way of life, from how we get information, meet people and create increasingly siloed communities. This has had a profound impact on democratic society. Our shared reality – the way we collectively understand the world – has rapidly been replaced by conflicting micro-realities that are often fueled by conspiracy theories, lies and “fake news.” This has been driven by a business model that supposedly gives us everything for free. All we have to do is give up our personal data and privacy. If you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world: • Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past. • The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases. • The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets. • A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species. • Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands. • There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide. From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right. Praise for The Future “Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg “In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review “Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly “Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian
For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers. “Mindf*ck demonstrates how digital influence operations, when they converged with the nasty business of politics, managed to hollow out democracies.”—The Washington Post Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica’s “American operations,” which were driven by Steve Bannon’s vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer’s money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals—in excess of 87 million—to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America’s soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground. Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born. Wylie’s decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data-crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only laid bare the profound vulnerabilities—and profound carelessness—in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.
Hacking the Electorate focuses on the consequences of campaigns using microtargeting databases to mobilize voters in elections. Eitan Hersh shows that most of what campaigns know about voters comes from a core set of public records, and the content of public records varies from state to state. This variation accounts for differences in campaign strategies and voter coalitions across the nation.
“A must-read...It reveals important truths.” —Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer “One of the finest books on information security published so far in this century—easily accessible, tightly argued, superbly well-sourced, intimidatingly perceptive.” —Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures Cyber attacks are less destructive than we thought they would be—but they are more pervasive, and much harder to prevent. With little fanfare and only occasional scrutiny, they target our banks, our tech and health systems, our democracy, and impact every aspect of our lives. Packed with insider information based on interviews with key players in defense and cyber security, declassified files, and forensic analysis of company reports, The Hacker and the State explores the real geopolitical competition of the digital age and reveals little-known details of how China, Russia, North Korea, Britain, and the United States hack one another in a relentless struggle for dominance. It moves deftly from underseas cable taps to underground nuclear sabotage, from blackouts and data breaches to election interference and billion-dollar heists. Ben Buchanan brings to life this continuous cycle of espionage and deception, attack and counterattack, destabilization and retaliation. Quietly, insidiously, cyber attacks have reshaped our national-security priorities and transformed spycraft and statecraft. The United States and its allies can no longer dominate the way they once did. From now on, the nation that hacks best will triumph. “A helpful reminder...of the sheer diligence and seriousness of purpose exhibited by the Russians in their mission.” —Jonathan Freedland, New York Review of Books “The best examination I have read of how increasingly dramatic developments in cyberspace are defining the ‘new normal’ of geopolitics in the digital age.” —General David Petraeus, former Director of the CIA “Fundamentally changes the way we think about cyber operations from ‘war’ to something of significant import that is not war—what Buchanan refers to as ‘real geopolitical competition.’” —Richard Harknett, former Scholar-in-Residence at United States Cyber Command
