Chapter 6 Further Reading: The National Security State
Core Texts
1. Church, Frank, et al. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. U.S. Senate, 1976.
The foundational primary source for any serious study of American political surveillance. All fourteen volumes are available through the National Security Archive and Senate historical records. Books II and III, covering the FBI's COINTELPRO programs and the intelligence agencies' surveillance of citizens, are most directly relevant to this chapter. The report's prose is careful and bureaucratic, which makes its conclusions about systematic constitutional violations all the more striking. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the documentary basis of what the chapter covers, rather than secondary accounts.
2. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. South End Press, 1990 (updated 2002).
The most comprehensive secondary account of COINTELPRO programs, organized around reproductions of the actual FBI documents. Churchill and Vander Wall provide context, analysis, and connections between individual programs that the Church Committee report does not always draw explicitly. The authors write from a clearly activist perspective, which means some interpretive claims require independent verification — but the documentary appendices are invaluable and have been extensively used by historians. Particularly strong on the targeting of Native American organizations through the AIM program.
3. Glenn Greenwald. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books, 2014.
Greenwald, one of the primary journalists who worked with Snowden, provides both an account of how the revelations unfolded and a sustained argument about their significance. The book reproduces key NSA documents, including PRISM slides and XKeyscore training materials, in accessible form. Greenwald is an explicitly partisan writer — he makes no pretense of neutrality on the surveillance questions — but his access to Snowden and the documents makes this an essential primary source for the period. Read alongside a more skeptical account (such as Shane Harris's work) for balance.
4. Barton Gellman. Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Penguin Press, 2020.
A more measured and deeply reported account than Greenwald's, from the Washington Post journalist who also worked with Snowden's documents. Gellman's account is distinctive for its focus on his own personal surveillance experience — the book opens with the revelation that the NSA had been monitoring Gellman's own communications — and for its careful treatment of the legal and technical architecture of the programs he covered. More attentive to ambiguity and institutional complexity than Greenwald; essential reading for a rounded view of the Snowden disclosures.
5. Tim Weiner. Enemies: A History of the FBI. Random House, 2012.
The most comprehensive history of the FBI available for a general audience, based on FBI records, congressional archives, and interviews with former officials. Weiner covers the Bureau from its founding through the Obama era, with particular depth on the Hoover period and COINTELPRO. The book is valuable for placing COINTELPRO in the context of the Bureau's broader institutional culture and trajectory, rather than treating it as an anomaly. Weiner's account of how successive administrations used and misused the Bureau provides essential context for understanding the relationship between executive authority and domestic intelligence.
6. Jon Penney. "Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use." Michigan Law Review 31 (2016): 117–138.
The empirical study discussed in the chapter's research study breakdown. The full article provides more methodological detail than the chapter's summary can convey, including Penney's matching approach for control articles and his response to alternative explanations. Essential reading for anyone interested in empirical research on surveillance effects. Penney has continued this research agenda in subsequent work on chilling effects in different contexts; the citations in this article are a good guide to the broader empirical literature on surveillance and behavior.
7. David Lyon. Surveillance After Snowden. Polity Press, 2015.
A sociological analysis of the Snowden revelations by one of the leading surveillance studies scholars. Lyon places the NSA programs in the context of the broader "surveillance society" he has analyzed throughout his career, examining what the revelations reveal about the relationship between commercial and state surveillance, the "surveillance culture" that normalizes monitoring, and what meaningful reform would require. Less focused on specific programs than Gellman or Greenwald, more focused on structural analysis. Excellent bridge between the policy specifics and the broader conceptual framework of surveillance studies.
8. James Risen. Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
Risen, a New York Times journalist who faced government pressure over his own surveillance reporting, provides a detailed account of how the national security state expanded after 9/11 — both in surveillance and in the broader "war on terror" contracting industry. The book is particularly valuable on the privatization of national security surveillance: how contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton (Snowden's employer) came to operate the programs nominally run by government agencies. Raises essential questions about accountability in the contractor ecosystem.
9. Priya Satia. Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire. Oxford University Press, 2008.
A historical perspective that provides essential global and temporal context. Satia demonstrates how British surveillance practices developed in colonial contexts — specifically in Iraq and Arabia during and after World War I — shaped the institutional culture of British intelligence. The imperial origins of surveillance techniques, applied first in colonized territories and then imported back to metropolitan contexts, is a pattern that appears throughout surveillance history and provides important context for Chapter 3's material on colonial census and categorization. Valuable for the recurring theme of historical continuity.
10. American Civil Liberties Union. The Surveillance State: A Primer. ACLU, 2022.
A comprehensive and regularly updated accessible overview of the legal landscape of surveillance in the United States. The ACLU has been a primary litigant in surveillance challenges — ACLU v. Clapper being the most prominent — and this document provides their institutional understanding of the legal framework, its gaps, and the ongoing litigation landscape. Written for a general audience. Available free on the ACLU's website. While not neutral — the ACLU takes explicit civil liberties positions — the legal analysis is careful and the factual descriptions are well-documented.
11. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. January 23, 2014.
The PCLOB is an independent executive branch agency created after 9/11 to provide civil liberties oversight of intelligence activities. This report — concluding that the Section 215 bulk telephone metadata program had produced essentially no unique intelligence value and raised serious legal and constitutional concerns — is a remarkable document: an executive branch oversight body finding that a major intelligence program was both ineffective and legally questionable. Available on the PCLOB website. Essential for evaluating government claims about the operational value of surveillance programs.
12. Charlie Savage. Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy. Little, Brown, 2015.
A detailed legal and political history of how executive power over national security surveillance expanded from the Bush administration through the Obama years. Savage, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his national security reporting, traces the legal arguments, internal debates, and institutional decisions that produced the surveillance architecture revealed by Snowden. Particularly valuable on the legal reasoning within the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which played a crucial role in authorizing programs that the public did not know existed. The most thorough legal account available for a general audience.
Chapter 6 Further Reading | Part 2: State Surveillance | The Architecture of Surveillance