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CYBERSPIES

Name: CYBERSPIES
Author: Gordon Corera
ISBN: 978-1-68177-154-0

THE SECRET HISTORY OF SURVEILLANCE, HACKING, AND DIGITAL ESPIONAGE

by Gordon Corera ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2016

A convincing argument that the most secure way to communicate is via snail mail.

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The history of cyberespionage, combining “related stories like encryption and code-breaking [and] the rise of the computer industry and its complex relationship with the secret world.”

In 1944, the first programmable electronic computer began operation in Britain’s Bletchley Park. Built to decipher German codes, it performed brilliantly. Computers remain essential to espionage and other dubious activities, writes BBC security correspondent Corera (The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, 2013, etc.) in this engrossing history of the dark side of the information revolution. By the end of the Cold War, technical advances enabled hackers and spies to steal “data at rest” inside a computer rather than struggle to intercept “data in motion” traveling from one place to another. In response, and also to detect the activity of terrorists, security organizations such as the National Security Agency sweep up immense quantities of information, including that of their own citizens, and filter it for suspicious activity. No one designed operating systems for security. In the 1980s, when experts discovered how easily hackers could penetrate computers, they began designing patches, firewalls, and other defenses. However, “it was not possible to retrofit security,” so no system is immune to intrusion, theft, and damage. Some attacks, such as the Stuxnet virus, which destroyed Iran’s uranium centrifuges, resemble acts of war, and there is no doubt that in future wars, “alongside tanks, missiles, and guns there would be viruses, worms, logic bombs, trapdoors and Trojan horses.” This book was originally published in England, so Americans will encounter unfamiliar acronyms and an emphasis on Britain’s experience, but Corera casts his net widely and makes it clear that America is the leader in the battle, as well as the most vulnerable.

A convincing argument that the most secure way to communicate is via snail mail.

Pub Date: July 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-68177-154-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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by Gordon Corera

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by Gordon Corera

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THE ART OF BETRAYAL
by Gordon Corera

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LUCKY

by Alice Sebold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1999

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...

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A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.

In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-85782-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TRUE CRIME

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2009
edited by Alice Sebold with Heidi Pitlor

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ALMOST MOON
by Alice Sebold

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOVELY BONES
by Alice Sebold

- IN THE NEWS
Man Convicted of Raping Alice Sebold Is Cleared

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Adaptation of Sebold’s ‘Lucky’ Is Dropped

- SEEN & HEARD
Author Apologizes To Man Wrongly Convicted of Rape

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THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

by James Baldwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1985

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The Atlanta child murders comprise the starting point for this virtuoso polemic against racism in America. Baldwin writes bluntly: "Others may see American progress in economic, racial and social affairs—I do not." It is this distinctive Baldwinian voice of outrage that powers his penetrating examination of why color still divides America. Baldwin thinks that Wayne Williams, the black man accused of the murders of 28 black children over a 22-month period, was railroaded. No matter that his conviction was presided over by a black judge in a Southern city governed by a black mayor. Williams was prosecuted under intense pressure to close a case that might tarnish Atlanta's reputation as a "city too busy to hate." A black administration's presence, says Baldwin, did not change the fact that the legal system served the commercial interests of a booming Southern city. To consider this only as an issue of class, contends Baldwin, is a denial by blacks and whites alike of America's legacy of slavery. He writes that ". . .this country, in toto, from Atlanta to Boston, to Texas to California, is not so much a vicious racial caldron—many, if not most countries are that—as a paranoid color wheel." By sketching the emergence of the black middle class and its complicity in maintaining the "white" rules, and the white flight from the city to the suburbs—leaving a mostly black, impoverished city. Baldwin describes how the wheel goes round. And its consequence remains: How do you become "white" enough to get up and out of the ghetto? Ironically, it was the rage of the parents of the murdered children that set Atlanta's color wheel spinning. Once they provoked national attention, according to Baldwin, the pressure to solve the crimes began. Until then, no one was ". . .compelled to hear the needs of a captive population."Baldwin delivers his judgment in cranky, idiosyncratic exposition that links the state of race relations with the prosecution of Williams. He details the official maneuvering that brought Williams to trial and the extraordinary legal decision to charge him with the murders of two black men, but permit the accusations and evidence of all the children's murders to be discussed at his trial. Baldwin has penetrated a sensational crime with his considerable novelist's skill for seeing things the rest of us don't. In the process, he's delivered a stinging indictment of racial stagnation.