Illusions of Security: Global surveillance and democracy in the post-9/11 world, by Maureen Webb
NOW AVAILABLE!
Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World
By Maureen Webb
Published by City Lights
Paperback, 304 pp CAN $20.50
A penetrating investigation of how governments worldwide - in collusion with corporations and advanced technologies - are monitoring us, and threatening our personal and civil liberties.
Maureen Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist. She is staff counsel at the Canadian Association of University Teachers and co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG). She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues, most recently testifying before the House of Commons and Senate Committees reviewing Canada's Anti-terrorism Act. In 2001, Maureen was a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University in New York. She is also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada.
As a founding member of ICLMG, Inter Pares is honoured to work with Maureen and proud to endorse her book. We hope you will be able to join us in reading this searing exposé of how the new global security system is threatening both American and global security, while undermining democracy worldwide.
To watch, listen to, or read Maureen's interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, please 
click here.
Praise for Illusions of Security
"Writer and lawyer Maureen Webb has produced a book every Canadian should read, and read again while still free to do so. [...] The new information and the transparent analysis she provides in Illusions of Security is a passionate call to the democrats in any political party anywhere to reclaim their role in determining the truth about terrorism and in directing governments to manage it differently." Lesley Hughes, Winnipeg Free Press
"The intel mountain has magnified massively since 9/11, as Ottawa lawyer Maureen Webb notes in her readable new book, Illusions of Security. Gobs of electronically generated scraps provide endless irrelevant "leads" based on verbal cues that set off recordings that must be evaluated, overwhelming the evaluators - though the best clues are always found through human legwork...." Rick Salutin, Columnist The Globe and Mail
"Webb's book is nothing if not well documented [...] it is an important and valuable counter to the government-stoked prevailing wisdom that what we have forfeited in terms of freedom and privacy is a small price to pay for collective safety." - Chris Cobb, The Ottawa Citizen
"Your government is spying on you, and it's going to get worse until we do something about it,' is Maureen Webb's message in her brilliant, much needed new book. In measured, lucid detail, Webb presents a wide-ranging account of the emerging global network of surveillance that is infringing on the personal privacy and civil liberties of people in the United States and worldwide. " - Nadine Strossen, President American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
"Illusions of Security" provides a comprehensive, detailed, and disturbing review of a decade of mass surveillance activities, with particular focus on the worldwide shift in investigative techniques in the post-9/11 world. The real-life impacts of these programs come into sharp focus in Webb's many examples of personal experiences, including the story of Maher Arar, the Canadian who, based on Canadian and American intelligence misinformation, was detained in the U.S. and sent to Syria, where he was interrogated and tortured." Allison Knight, Staff Counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
"Illusions of Security is a thorough and terrifying compendium of the threats to democracy posed by the unquestioning use of technology. Maureen Webb portrays a frightening image of high-placed officials playing with their technological toys; meanwhile the real world - and its real insecurities - elude them." - Ellen Ullman, author of The Bug: A Novel and Close to the Machine
| Reviewed August 5, 2009 |  |
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