Security Culture

This book is comprised of two related pieces covering recent cases of informants and agents provocateurs in the US. Part one “Witness to Betrayal“ is a long form interview with scott crow conducted by author Kristian Williams. In the interview crow bares all in his most comprehensive conversation about FBI informant Brandon Darby, their complicated relationship and the fallout from Brandon’s actions personally and politically in wider movements. Part two is an essay by Kristian Williams “Profiles of Provocateurs” which analyzes recent case studies of the use of agents provocateurs in political prosecutions, offers some warning signs of agents in these cases and practical advice on taking care of ourselves in the face of repression.

The Art of Invisibility (also on audio)

Be online without leaving a trace. Your every step online is being tracked and stored, and your identity literally stolen. Big companies and big governments want to know and exploit what you do, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand.

In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick uses true-life stories to show exactly what is happening without your knowledge, teaching you “the art of invisibility” — online and real-world tactics to protect you and your family, using easy step-by-step instructions.

Reading this book, you will learn everything from password protection and smart Wi-Fi usage to advanced techniques designed to maximize your anonymity. Kevin Mitnick knows exactly how vulnerabilities can be exploited and just what to do to prevent that from happening.

The world’s most famous — and formerly the US government’s most wanted — computer hacker, he has hacked into some of the country’s most powerful and seemingly impenetrable agencies and companies, and at one point was on a three-year run from the FBI. Now Mitnick is reformed and widely regarded as the expert on the subject of computer security. Invisibility isn’t just for superheroes; privacy is a power you deserve and need in the age of Big Brother and Big Data.

How to Disappear (also on audio)

In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more alluring. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and promote ourselves. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but from vast and pervasive technology companies that want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life—for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world’s most exotic and remote places, she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared to the way Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds a sense of affiliation with the world around her as she ages, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness.

How to Disappear is a unique and exhilarating accomplishment, overturning the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of remaining inconspicuous, and finding genuine alternatives to a life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and intrusive world.

A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism (also on audio)

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks.

The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal.

Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.

The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (also on audio)

Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children.

Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown.

As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, Band of Brothers, and A Train in Winter, The Light of Days at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time. Judy Batalion—the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors—takes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Joining Renia are other women who served as couriers, armed fighters, intelligence agents, and saboteurs, all who put their lives in mortal danger to carry out their missions. Batalion follows these women through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few—like Renia, who orchestrated her own audacious escape from a brutal Nazi jail—into the late 20th century and beyond.

Powerful and inspiring, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.

Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (also on audio)

Something Fierce, winner of Canada Reads 2012, is a gripping story of love, war and resistance. A rare first-hand account of revolutionary life, it takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet’s Chile. Passionate and deep personal, Carmen captures the struggle between her commitment to the movement and her youthful desires and budding sexuality.

Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States

Focusing on a variety of movements for political, social, and economic change in the US, Jules Boykoff shows the tools used by government agents to undermine the long-term viability of opposition in this country. Despite the pretense of democratic ideals, the US government has ruthlessly suppressed dissent, using hard-to-detect and rarely acknowledged tactics.
Boykoff breaks it down for readers, using a methodical, step-by-step analysis to open the government’s bag of tricks for all to see.

Beyond Bullets offers indispensable lessons to on-the-ground activists—those most likely to suffer the effects of infiltration, “snitchjacketing,” surveillance, “black propaganda,” and other insidious practices—as well as to those studying the forms of authoritarian rule in democratic societies.

Salvador Puig Antich: Collected Writings on Repression and Resistance in Franco’s Spain

The name Salvador Puig Antich and the events surrounding the so-called Transition from fascism are famous within Spain, but largely unknown elsewhere. This collection, originally published in Catalan on the forty-fifth anniversary of Puig Antich’s execution, remedies that.

In the early 1970s, Salvador Puig Antich of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL) was engaged in a fight to the death with Franco’s brutal fascist dictatorship over the future of Spain. They expropriated banks and smuggled clandestine literature in support of the growing movement of wildcat workers’ strikes. In 1974, the Franco regime garroted Puig Antich—literally strangled him to death. The charge was for shooting a policeman during his arrest, the details of which were contested. Puig Antich’s case became a cause célèbre internationally. This book makes sense of his life and death by placing them in their historical and political context. Some contributors describe the intensity of life in an armed group, others focus on the political debates in the MIL and the broader movement. Puig Antich’s comrades speak of the contemporary strike movement, his family members recount the wait for his execution. Sometimes perspectives clash, a testament to the conflicts, debates, and contradictions that form an integral part of this history of struggle. This edition also includes a new Introduction by Peter Gelderloos for English-language readers, as well as photos, documents, a glossary, and a selection of Puig Antich’s letters and other writings.

Fear in Chile: Life Under Pinochet

Fear in Chile is an extraordinary collection of firstperson accounts of life under dictatorship. In the 1980s, shortly after Chile emerged from one of the century’s most notorious reigns of terror, Chilean journalist Patricia Politzer interviewed figures including a revolutionary activist, a military leader loyal to General Augusto Pinochet, a bank clerk concerned with the status quo, the mother of one of the “disappeared,” as well as a dozen other men and women from every political position and social stratum of Chilean life. The result is a broad, vivid, yet nonideological view of modern life under military rule, about which Ariel Dorfman writes, “I can think of no better introduction to my country.”

With the October 1998 arrest of General Pinochet in Great Britain and renewed world awareness of the horrendous crimes committed during his regime, Fear in Chile, updated with a new afterword by the author that considers the recent attempts to prosecute Pinochet for human-rights violations, offers a vivid portrait of Chile’s Pinochet era.