A history with surprising new revelations about the depths of government surveillance and constitutional rights abuses
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anarchist and socialist political movements spurred the expansion of nascent US federal surveillance capabilities. But it was the ensuing, decades-long persistent exaggerations of domestic political threats that drove an exponential increase in the size and scope of unlawful government surveillance and related political repression, which continue to the present.
The Triumph of Fear is a history of the rise and expansion of surveillance-enabled political repression in the United States from the 1890s to 1961. Drawing on declassified government documents and other primary sources, many obtained via dozens of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and analyzed for the first time, Eddington offers historians, legal scholars, and general readers surprising new revelations about the depths of government surveillance programs and how this domestic spying helped fuel federal assaults on free speech and association.
Reviews
"The Triumph of Fear is simultaneously enriching and anxiety inducing, fascinating and terrifying. Eddington tells well—with authority, insight, passion, and lived experience—a story as relevant and pressing now as it ever has been, and brings the rigor and urgency needed to get across just how deeply Americans should care about how the state uses its power to see as a means to oppress. Much of what I learned from the book it would be more comfortable not to know, but Eddington makes a strong case that knowing these uncomfortable truths about our government's abuse of surveillance in the service of political repression is necessary to prevent from happening, again and again, the damaging activities he so thoroughly chronicles. Eddington's book is a triumph that, one hopes, will play an important role in undoing that of its title."—Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of programs, Institute for Humane Studies and founder, ReImagining Liberty
About the Author
Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. He was formerly a CIA analyst and a senior policy adviser to Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ).
