By request for an agent I’m really excited to work with, here’s a summary of my first-next book:
Too Big to Surveil: Tech, World Peace, and Chocolate is a hybrid project combining scholarly research, journalism, artistic reflection, and memoir reflecting the author’s experience engaging in security research while living in a surveillance state. The research shows how mass security screenings for low-prevalence problems jeopardize security. Such programs have been growing—even though National Academy scientists warned Congress about the security threat they pose in 2003. Through a range of interviews, conversations, experiments, and experiences dealing with trauma, the author suggests it was the national trauma of 9/11 that shaped this growing threat. Her research also pushes the boundaries of what we know about the potential for bias in technological decisions that can seem neutral and scientific. Accordingly, she reflects on documented CIA lying to Congress about equal opportunity law when it comes to security decisions implicated in some of the same backfiring security programs, the surprisingly fragile nature of mass surveillance, and the political nature of defining what violence is considered political.
Boy oh, she wants to offer hope, and celebrate truth and beauty! To make best practices better, to learn and help learn (Dweck), not judge and be judged. And oh, is the manuscript messy in its current state, struggling with that creative-not-destructive charge, and the ordinary battles of structure and ambiguity.
