Reading list
Books behind our beat.
These are the books that shape how our reporters and editors think about surveillance, data and power: who collects information about people, who buys it, and who answers for what is done with it. Most are reporting; the rest are research and arguments we keep returning to, including some we argue with.
Borrow them from your library, or buy them from an independent bookshop if you can. We link to two in Baltimore, Greedy Reads and The Ivy Bookshop; any independent shop can order these. Under each book is a link to its record on Open Library, a free catalog of books run by the nonprofit Internet Archive, and one to the book at Greedy Reads.
Many public libraries also lend e-books and audiobooks through Libby, a free app; search it for these titles with your library card.
We have no arrangement with either shop, and we earn nothing from these links.
Policing
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Means of Control
Reports how American military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies buy location and other personal data from data brokers and advertising companies, and so obtain by purchase much of what would otherwise take a warrant. The market our Policing desk reports on, laid out end to end.
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Your Face Belongs to Us
The story of a small start-up that copied billions of photos from the public web to build a face search tool and sold it to police, told by the New York Times reporter who first revealed it. It shows how quickly a tool that ends anonymity in public can spread before any law catches up.
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Predict and Surveil
A sociologist’s years of fieldwork inside the Los Angeles Police Department, on how data platforms and predictive tools changed whom officers watch. She finds that data-driven policing can widen surveillance to people who have never been in trouble with the police and deepen the inequalities it inherits.
Work
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Ghost Work
An anthropologist and a computer scientist studied the people who do short, on-demand tasks such as labeling images and checking content behind apps and automated services. They argue that this hidden workforce does essential work with few of the protections of ordinary employment.
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Code Dependent
The Financial Times’s artificial intelligence editor follows people around the world whose lives are shaped by automated systems, among them the low-paid workers who label training data, a delivery courier trying to work out how an app sets his pay, and women targeted with fabricated sexual images.
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Uberland
An ethnographer spent four years interviewing ride-hail drivers in the United States and Canada. She shows how an app sets their pay, assigns their work and disciplines them while the company describes them as their own bosses.
Health
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Bad Blood
The Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed Theranos tells how the blood-testing start-up said its machines could run a wide range of tests on a few drops of blood when they could not, and how it used lawyers and private investigators against employees who raised concerns.
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Our Bodies, Our Data
How companies that few patients have heard of collect prescription and other medical records, remove the names and sell what remains, mostly to drug makers. Tanner also shows how records stripped of names can sometimes be matched back to the people they describe.
Influence
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Spooked
A former New York Times reporter on the private intelligence business: firms of former spies and journalists hired by companies, wealthy clients and their lawyers to gather information on opponents, and the ways their work finds its way into the news.
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Catch and Kill
Farrow’s account of reporting on allegations of sexual abuse against a powerful film producer. It describes the private investigators, lawyers and tabloid deals used to keep such allegations out of the press, and what it took to publish anyway.
Data
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Dragnet Nation
An investigative reporter documents who collects information about ordinary Americans, from government agencies to data brokers and advertisers, and records her own year-long attempt to opt out of tracking: what worked, what didn’t and what it cost.
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Data Cartels
A law professor and former law librarian shows that the few companies behind the main legal research and academic publishing services also sell personal data, including to police and immigration authorities, and argues that this concentration puts essential information under private control.
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Weapons of Math Destruction
A mathematician and former hedge fund analyst argues that opaque scoring models used in hiring, lending, insurance, policing and teacher evaluation can punish the poor and reinforce discrimination, while the people they score have little way to challenge them.
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Automating Inequality
A political scientist reports on automated systems for welfare eligibility in Indiana, homeless services in Los Angeles and child protection in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and argues that such systems profile, police and punish poor and working-class people.
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
A professor emerita at Harvard Business School argues that the largest internet companies built a new kind of business on taking data about people’s behavior, often without their knowledge, to predict and steer what they do next.
The press and the state
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Pegasus
The two journalists who coordinated the Pegasus Project tell how reporters from more than a dozen news organizations investigated a leaked list of phone numbers of possible targets of spyware sold to governments, and, with forensic help from Amnesty International, found traces of it on journalists’ phones.
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No Place to Hide
One of the journalists to whom a National Security Agency contractor gave classified documents in 2013 tells how that reporting came about, and reproduces documents on the scale of the agency’s collection of phone and internet records.
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Manufacturing Consent
An argument, built on case studies of American coverage of wars and elections abroad, that ownership, advertising, dependence on official sources and organized pressure filter the news in favor of established power. Worth reading even where you disagree, because it asks who pays for the news.
Last updated .