Social Intelligence Science

The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice - a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.

In the very near future, smart “technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency?

Drawing on declassified documents, interviews with intelligence veterans and policymakers, and other sources, The Image of the Enemy examines how seven countries analyzed and used intelligence to understand their main adversary. The cases in the book include the Soviet Union's analysis of the United States (and vice versa), East Germany's analysis of West Germany (and vice versa), British intelligence in the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Israeli intelligence about the Palestinians, and more.

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, American intelligence agencies have launched spies in the sky, implanted spies in the ether, burrowed spies underground, sunk spies in the ocean, and even tried to control spies' minds by chemical means. But these weren't human spies. Instead, the United States expanded its reach around the globe through techno-spies. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach investigates how America's technophiles inadvertently created a global espionage empire: one based on technology, not land.

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

Summer 2017: computer screens go blank in 150 countries. The NHS is so affected that hospitals can only take in patients for A&E. Ambulances are grounded. Computer screens turn on spontaneously and warnings appear. Employees who desperately pull the plugs are too late. Restarting is pointless; the computers are locked. And now the attackers ask each victim for money. This is hijack software. It is just one example of how vulnerable the digital world has made us.

Guy Burgess était un membre du Secret Intelligence Service recruté comme agent par les services soviétiques. Il appartenait au groupe d'espions connu sous le nom des Cinq de Cambridge qui trahirent leur pays pendant la guerre froide. Burgess transmit notamment des documents secrets britanniques et aida un autre agent soviétique, Kim Philby, à rejoindre à son tour le SIS. Il devient après la guerre secrétaire du ministre d'État aux Affaires étrangères, Hector McNeil, et transmet des documents secrets du Foreign Office au KGB.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century". Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of support, newspaper editorials, and protests in countries around the world. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs were executed after years of appeals, making them the only civilians ever put to death for conspiracy-related activities. Yet even after their executions, protests continued.

This is the story of the NSA — the agency you weren’t supposed to know existed, quietly building the largest surveillance machine in human history, run by math nerds, funded by fear, and powered by your private life. From Cold War cables to smart phone wiretaps, secret courts to predictive policing, The NSA: The World’s Most Powerful Perverts is a sharp, sarcastic, and disturbingly true deep dive into how one agency went from “born bugged” to watching everyone, all the time, forever.

Being a Secret Service agent is one of the most treacherous jobs in the world and never more so than in today's highly polarized America. Facing threats from fence jumpers and manifesto writers, and from murderous terrorists and sophisticated spies, protecting the president is harder than ever. In an age of hyper-partisan politics, emotions are high and threats are everywhere. On top of that, with international tensions reaching a boiling point, it's harder than ever to determine friend from foe.

Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service - which specialized in codes and ciphers - lurking in the shadows. Drawing on previously neglected Russian sources, Haslam reveals how both were in fact crucial to the survival of the Soviet state. This was especially true after Stalin's death in 1953, as the Cold War heated up and dedicated Communist agents the regime had relied upon - Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Donald Maclean - were betrayed.

La storia di come le reti di informazione hanno fatto e disfatto il nostro mondo, dall’autore del bestseller mondiale Sapiens. Negli ultimi centomila anni, noi Sapiens abbiamo accumulato un enorme potere. Eppure, nonostante tutte le nostre scoperte, invenzioni e conquiste, oggi ci troviamo in una crisi esistenziale. Il mondo è sull’orlo del collasso ecologico. La disinformazione dilaga. E ci stiamo buttando a capofitto nell’era dell’intelligenza artificiale, una nuova rete di informazioni che minaccia di annientarci. Perché siamo così autodistruttivi?

When the towers fell on September 11, 2001, nowhere were the reverberations more powerfully felt than at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Almost overnight, the intelligence organization evolved into a warfighting intelligence service, constructing what was known internally as "the Program": a web of top-secret detention facilities intended to help prevent future attacks on American soil and around the world. With Black Site, former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center Philip Mudd presents a full, never-before-told story of this now-controversial program.

The Internet and smartphone are just the latest in a 250-year-long cycle of disruption that has continuously changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we interact. The coming Augmented Age, however, promises a level of disruption, behavioral shifts, and changes that are unparalleled. While consumers today are camping outside of an Apple store waiting to be one of the first to score a new Apple Watch or iPhone, the next generation of wearables will be able to predict if we're likely to have a heart attack and recommend a course of action.

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad.

We are living in an age of conspiracy theories, whether it's an enduring, widely held belief such as government involvement in the Kennedy assassination, fears of a powerful infiltrating group, or modern fringe movements of varying popularity such as birtherism and trutherism. What is it in American culture that makes conspiracy theories proliferate? Who is targeted, and why? Are we in the heyday of the conspiracy theory, or is it in decline? American Conspiracy Theories is the first to use broad, long-term empirical data to analyze this popular American tendency.

Already infamous for the arbitrary, paranoid persecution of its own citizens throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union - as is revealed in John Koeher’s revelatory, eye-opening exposé - also waged a vicious espionage campaign against the Catholic Church and its followers. From the persecution of local priests to an assassination order against Pope John Paul II, the KGB viewed Catholicism as a threat to stability in Eastern Europe and treated the church as an enemy of the State. Lifetime journalist and former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer John Koehler has written the definitive book on this startling history.

By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.

In The Paradox of Progress, Dr. Michael M. Karch delves into the ethical complexities of AI’s rapid evolution. Drawing from a career spanning three decades in robotics, orthopedic surgery, and international disaster response, Dr. Karch investigates AI’s far-reaching impact and initiates critical discussion about its duality. This is a compelling exploration through historical precedents of progress and AI’s challenges today, including fears of data bias, deep fakes, technological hegemony, and job displacement.