Security Science

On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with barely a trace, carrying 239 people onboard - seemingly vanishing into the dark night. The airplane's whereabouts and fate would quickly become one of the biggest aviation mysteries of our time....

lf a man cannot stand freedom, he will probably turn fascist. This, in the fewest possible words, is the essential argument in this modem classic, Escape from Freedom. The author, Erich Fromm, is a distinguished psychologist, late of Berlin and Heidelberg, now of New York City.

On October 27, 2018, 11 Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a total shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh raised a question Americans can no longer avoid: Could it happen here? This audiobook is Weiss' answer.

In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, along with Parry’s never-before-seen archives, and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to socio-politically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

When We Walk By takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ourselves and as a society—when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets. And it brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.

As an embedded journalist in Iraq, North got a soldier's-eye view, often while under fire, of what the mainstream media failed to report. A decorated combat veteran, North watched Operation Iraqi Freedom with trained eyes unmatched by other journalists. What he witnessed compelled him to challenge post-war critics of the operation for their uninformed and deceptive views.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will." So writes Jonathan Rauch in Kindly Inquisitors, which has challenged listeners for more than 20 years with its bracing and provocative exploration of the issues surrounding attempts to limit free speech.

More than 40 years after President Johnson signed the landmark Fair Housing Act into law, residential segregation in America remains unresolved. Designed to help dismantle the nation’s racially divided housing patterns, the act has gone largely ignored by every presidential administration - Democrat and Republican alike - since 1968. In Living Apart, ProPublica investigates this failing.

Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.

In 2012, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was clinging to power in a vicious civil war. When intelligence revealed that the dictator might resort to using chemical weapons, Pres. Obama warned that doing so would cross “a red line”. Assad did it anyway, killing hundreds of civilians and forcing Obama to decide if he would mire America in another unpopular war. When Russia offered to broker the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons, Obama leapt at the out. So begins an electrifying race to find, remove, and destroy 1,300 tons of chemical weapons in the midst of a raging civil war.

The common perception of a CIA officer is someone who collects secret intelligence abroad-a spy. However, the critical link between secrets and policy is the intelligence analyst. The CIA Intelligence Analyst brings to light the vital, but often-unseen, work of these officers.

What happens when a society is run by people who are antisocial? Welcome to baby boomer America. In A Generation of Sociopaths, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity.

For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolent resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes - including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government - who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.

A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the "America first" mind-set and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the 21st century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.

Murder on the Inside tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Occurring just months before the uprising at Attica Prison, the Kingston riot has remained largely undocumented, and few have known the details—yet the tense drama chronicled here is more relevant today than ever. A gripping account of the standoff and the efforts for justice and reform it inspired, Murder on the Inside is essential listening for our times.

From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy.

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers’s life’s work. It’s a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth.