Social Intelligence Science

It has become axiomatic to contend that U.S. foreign policy must adapt to an era of renewed "great-power competition." The United States went on a quarter-century strategic detour after the Cold War, the argument goes, basking in triumphalism and getting bogged down in the Middle East. Now China and Russia are increasingly challenging its influence and undercutting the order it has led since 1945. How should it respond to these two formidable authoritarian powers?

What happens when a father asks his son to lie for the greater good? Growing up, Scott C. Johnson always suspected that his father was different. Only as a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA’s most trusted officers. At first the secret was thrilling. But over time, Scott began to have doubts. How could a man so rigorously trained to deceive and manipulate simply turn off those skills at home? His father had been living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to separate from the truth.

In AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health, a team of veteran Microsoft AI researchers delivers an insightful and fascinating discussion of how one of the world's most recognizable software companies is tackling intractable social problems with the power of artificial intelligence (AI). In the book, you'll see real in-the-field examples of researchers using AI with replicable methods and reusable AI code to inspire your own uses.

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him. After a disconcerting amount of time, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, walked in the door. Following this life-changing encounter, Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

A revelatory account of the cloak-and-dagger Israeli campaign to target the finances fueling terror organizations - an effort that became the blueprint for US efforts to combat threats like ISIS and drug cartels. ISIS boasted $2.4 billion of revenue in 2015, yet for too long the global war on terror overlooked financial warfare as an offensive strategy. "Harpoon", the creation of Mossad legend Meir Dagan, directed spies, soldiers, and attorneys to disrupt and destroy money pipelines and financial institutions that paid for the bloodshed.

Author of the number one New York Times best seller Against All Enemies, former presidential advisor and counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke sounds a timely and chilling warning about America's vulnerability in a terrifying new international conflict -cyber war! Every concerned American should listen to this startling and explosive book that offers an insider's view of White House situation room operations and carries the listener to the frontlines of our cyber defense. Cyber War exposes a virulent threat to our nation's security.

Olive Yang was a widely mythologized genderqueer lesbian opium-pioneer in the 1950s heyday of the Golden Triangle. After escaping an arranged marriage with a noble cousin, Olive felt that she had no choice but to lead a life of banditry with an anti-communist rebel army supported by the CIA. As her smuggling empire grew, she became so powerful and infamous that novelists were inspired to write about her evil ruthlessness and beauty. Yet, Olive’s real life and identity remained a mystery to many.

After a series of escapades both online and off that brought him in and out of 4chan forums, the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man. He was arrested for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposed in a security lapse by the intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. An influential journalist who is also active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous, Brown recounts exploits from a life shaped by an often self-destructive drive to speak truth to power.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

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.

In Robot-Proof, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover - to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot. A "robot-proof" education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society.

In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men’s rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country - all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.

The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem. Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late 19th century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB - and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world.

On December 16, 2019, Jerrold Nadler, Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, and the full Committee on the Judiciary released an updated version of the Impeachment Report. Now officially titled Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, Report of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, this document serves as the latest government-issued report from the Democrat-led House.

For three nerve-wracking years, Naveed Jamali spied on America for the Russians, trading thumb drives of sensitive technical data for envelopes of cash, selling out his own beloved country across noisy restaurant tables and in quiet parking lots. Or so the Russians believed. In fact this young American civilian was a covert double agent working with the FBI. The Cold War wasn't really over. It had just gone high tech.

A CIA station chief, later Jordan's lawyer in Washington, reveals the secret history of a lost peace.

Jack O'Connell possessed an uncanny ability to be at the center of things. On his arrival in Jordan in 1958, he unraveled a coup aimed at the young King Hussein, who would become America's most reliable Middle East ally. Over time, their bond of trust and friendship deepened. His narrative contains secrets that will revise our understanding of the Middle East.

Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher's Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Borger recounts how Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic - both now on trial in The Hague - were finally tracked down and describes the intrigue behind the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president who became the first head of state to stand before an international tribunal for crimes perpetrated in a time of war.

In 1917, a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II - a dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the Tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes - starting with the British Empire. Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia and their mission to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world.