Book Review: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025).

Several years ago, I read and reviewed an excellent book from 2016 about Silicon Valley and particularly Facebook called Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine  by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It was a memoir by a former Wall Street trader who moved to California around 2010, and jumped into the high tech investment world. In addition to many interesting and appalling stories of the people and bad behavior he encountered along the way, Martinez’s story stood out for its clear presentation of how the electronic markets in personal data for advertising work at places like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, and what it’s like to work in those high-tech corporate environments. 

With Sarah Wynn-Williams' splendid new tell-all memoir about life in the upper ranks of Facebook’s leadership, Careless People, we now have an even more gripping, often shocking but highly readable insider’s account of the people who have built and now control the world’s most powerful social media company, and the lawless and corrupt practices that have made Facebook and Meta the destructive forces they have become in modern society. Some of these outrages have already been investigated and publicized in the news media, but Wynn-Williams’ story takes it to a whole new level of factual detail and disillusioning personal experience.

 

The author’s origin story is an unusual one. The childhood survivor of a near-fatal shark attack in her native New Zealand, she grew up to become an idealistic young lawyer and diplomat who discovered Facebook around 2009. She was immediately enthralled by the possibilities the social media app presented for promoting open communications between people and communities, resisting authoritarian regimes (as seemed to be happening during the “Arab Spring” at that time), and generally being a new and important force for social good in the world.

 

With that hopeful and idealistic perspective, she spent more than a year trying to find an “in” at the relatively new Facebook company, so she could pitch her idea for a job she wanted to do there: director of global public policy. At first, she made little progress, because the top management hadn’t even considered the idea that Facebook had the potential to run into many kinds of legal conflict, complex policy issues and resistance from political leaders in countries around the world. But eventually, through sheer persistence, she was able to talk herself into the job she had invented, and began to work regularly with Facebook’s top leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others. 

 

As she describes it, Wynn-Williams began filled with hopes for herself and her new career, imagining a useful role at Facebook where she could use her training and experience in international law and diplomacy to help make the company and its products a force for positive change around the world. With these goals in mind, she began encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to start trying to make personal connections with important global leaders, in order to create favorable conditions for promoting Facebook’s apps and the company in countries around the world.

 

She brought her diplomatic skills and experience to bear, trying to set up meetings, handle protocol, and prep the boss for what should be discussed in those meetings with world leaders and other CEOs. It turned out that wasn’t so easy, since Zuckerberg at this early stage was uncomfortable meeting new people, hated politics, didn’t think he needed to know anything or be prepared for these meetings in advance, and basically wanted someone else to deal with it all. Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams kept trying.

 

She also became part of the circle of young women staffers around Sheryl Sandberg. She soon found herself  recruited along with other female staff to do non-company work promoting Sandberg’s book Lean In, helping to manage all the attendant glory and publicity Sandberg received as a supposed feminist success story, the powerful professional woman and visionary corporate leader who could balance work and family, and “have it all”. But the author soon realized that Sheryl could “have it all” mainly because of her stupendous wealth, her paid full-time childcare staff, and her ability at work to compel others to do things for her, without regard for the toll that might take on her assistants, or the appropriateness of having Facebook pay for these personal services for her.

 

What makes Wynn-Williams’ story so compelling are the harrowing daily personal experiences and interactions she describes, and the insights she has on what she had to do to try to survive and succeed in this toxic work environment. She describes a work culture where having children and families is something to be essentially hidden from supervisors, where insane work hours and demands on personal time are normal expectations of employees by upper management. She recounts going through several pregnancies during her time at Facebook, one with calamitous damage to her health, and reveals how her bosses still expected her to be working from home or going on foreign trips, even during her maternity leave and an extended period of physical recovery.

 

The author also gives chilling descriptions of ongoing sexual harassment, both from her male boss Joel Kaplan and from Sheryl Sandberg, who Wynn-Williams claims tried to force her to go to bed with Sandberg during a long international flight on a private jet. Wynn-Williams describes many of the things she did at work for years to try to stay out of trouble and under the radar of top leadership, while also trying to report and resist wrongdoing, whether it was about sexual harassment, or her repeated objections to the business’s policies and practices when they appeared to be immoral, corrupt, illegal or just plain stupid.

 

The author confirms Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reported rage at having Facebook blamed by the press for Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory. Zuckerberg apparently felt Facebook was being unjustly accused and defamed, at least until his own managers explained to him all the powerful software and data tools for voter manipulation they had used on Trump’s behalf. He then ended up testifying in Congress, and with the support of his staff, lied about and obfuscated the company’s extensive consulting work for the Trump campaign, and its powerful effects, according to Wynn-Williams.

 

Later in the book, Wynn-Williams also delves into details of Facebook’s attempts to win its way into the Chinese market, which became one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities in his relentless quest for more customers. According to her account, the Facebook leadership appeared untroubled by what it concluded was the need to collaborate with China’s authoritarian government in providing spying capabilities against its own population, if that would advance the company’s interests. The author claims they were also perfectly willing to lie to the U.S. government about the extent of their cooperation with the Xi regime, and lie to the Xi regime about their covert attempts to penetrate the market without meeting the Chinese government’s legal requirements. She provides numerous examples to back up these claims.

 

Another shocking reveal was the fact that marketing teams at Facebook had developed advertising decks to promote their abilities to target 13-17 year old girls with signs of emotional distress (as contained in their posts) for advertising that would take advantage of the psychologically vulnerable state of those girls. Of course, when Facebook was caught out on this, and hauled before Congress to explain, the company’s leadership lied, and denied they had those capabilities. But they did, and they were promoting and selling those capabilities to customers, who wanted to advertise products like weight loss aids and beauty products to under-age girls in crisis.

 

Ultimately, after most of a decade in the upper echelons of the Facebook hierarchy, the author’s attempts to encourage Facebook to do the right things in different situations, whether in the realm of international law and policy, or in dealing with employee harassment by top leaders, ended with her being fired. None of the leaders responsible for all these problems apologized to her, or acknowledged any wrongdoing. They just got rid of her, which is of course what they are still hoping to do now, by suggesting the author is just a disgruntled fired employee with emotional problems and a “sour grapes” grudge against the company. 

 

I saw a news report that Facebook’s and Meta’s leadership really did not want this book to be published, and it’s obvious why not after reading it. It’s potentially a devastating blow to the Facebook and Meta brands, not to mention the reputations of people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg. But I’m convinced that Wynn-Williams is telling the truth about this crew of “careless people”. She paints a very believable and by-now familiar picture of the toxic high-tech corporate culture they’ve created, and shows how their vast wealth, unchecked ambition and lack of any moral compass or empathy for others on a routine basis has led them to launch these destructive social media applications out into the world, with little concern for their adverse effects on individuals or society.

 

I know there has been enough negative press and analysis about Facebook and Meta in the past few years that many people might not want to hear any more about it. But this book is essential for really understanding the extent of the cynicism, greed and corruption at the heart of Meta and its leadership, and the negative effects that has had on the politics of our time, our attention and our social lives.

 

It’s also a riveting read, and a compelling personal story of survival and endurance in the face of adversity, disillusionment and loss. Very highly recommended.   

Book Review: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). Chris Miller.

I was intrigued this morning to read an article about a growing problem in the latest iterations of new generative AI products. This problem has been recognized and widely discussed for the last several years, but apparently in many cases, it’s not being solved as the AI software and systems become more sophisticated and complex. Apparently it’s getting worse, much worse. That problem is “hallucination”, the tendency of AI systems to make up “facts” in response to queries. 

 

When I read news like that, it tends to support a gut feeling of mine that the current hype about AI and how it’s going to change everything for the better is at the very least overblown, and perhaps completely wrong, a sci-fi fantasy from our tech leaders’ childhoods that in reality could become a dystopian, dangerous nightmare, rather than a wondrous achievement for humanity. But that’s a larger topic for another time.

 

In the meantime, our current computer systems, our phones, the internet and all the electronic information technologies of our era have become indispensable resources for every aspect of our lives, at work and at play. Through the accumulated scientific knowledge and engineering of the recent past, these things all exist, and most of us take them for granted. We don’t tend to think about them that much, but perhaps we should.

 

Most of us probably don’t think about how critical computer automation has become to our survival, as more and more of our societal life support systems, our roads, our airspace, our banking system, our hospitals, our communications and so many other parts of modern society are put under computer control. Very few of us actually know much about how these things came to be, how they work, or what it takes to keep turning out the steadily more powerful automation products we all use and rely upon.

 

This is why Chris Miller’s book Chip War is the essential book for understanding many aspects of our current situation. It starts at the beginning, telling the history of the invention of the transistor, soon followed by the development of the integrated circuit (known as a “chip”), a small electronic component onto which many transistors can be printed using a highly refined photo imaging process. He also provides a clear description for the lay reader on how these inventions function, and why they are essential to the creation of computers and the internet.

 

From that necessary introduction, he then tells a much longer and more complicated story about how the initial inventions were steadily improved and disseminated around the world over the past half-century. He focuses on important individuals at each stage of development, and how certain companies and countries competed to dominate different aspects of both ongoing creation of better chip designs, and the actual production of the chips based on the designs.

 

As someone with a long history in IT and computers myself, I knew some of what was in this riveting and important book, but I learned so much more, and it was fascinating.

 

Miller talks about the different approaches taken by important countries over the decades to try to gain access to the newest and best designs and products coming out of the U.S.A. For example, he traces how the Soviet Union and then Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse tried to simply steal the latest technology from the West, both the designs and often the chips themselves. As he explains, this has kept Russia consistently a decade behind the United States and Europe in the types and quality of chips it could produce or consume in mass.

 

In China, however, they took a different route. While trying to build up their own research and development capabilities, the Chinese focused on creating advanced manufacturing for some types of chips, especially memory chips, as well as building factories to create integrated products like circuit boards, and consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones. It wasn’t that they didn’t also steal the latest Western technology whenever they could, but they did vastly more than Russia to also develop their own advanced research and manufacturing capabilities. As a result, they own or dominate some important segments of the global chip manufacturing and high-tech product market.

 

In the United States, where the technology was invented, the top companies dominated most or all aspects of creating the latest, most advanced chips for several decades. But over time, some of the premier companies were out-competed by a few companies in other countries, and merged or went out of business.

 

The United States, particularly with companies like Intel and AMD,  still retains dominance in the development of the new designs for the latest generations of chips, but several other countries now have companies in that race. In the meantime, the United States, and almost all other countries, have ceded control over the production of the most vital chips – the CPUs, or Central Processing Units that control the operations of all computers – to a single country, Taiwan, and to a single company there that has been willing to make the huge investments in equipment and facilities required to be able to produce the current and near-future generations of processor chips.

 

The story of how that happened, how the United States and its premier chip companies lost the ability to manufacture its most vital computing components after designing them is just one fascinating tale from this exhaustive history of the chip industry. And it is an absolutely vital story to know and understand, in order to better comprehend some major political issues we now face.

 

For example, knowing that Taiwan is the world’s sole source for producing the latest and best CPU chips explains why the question of China’s desire to take back control of Taiwan, and the West’s need to prevent that has become such a perennially vital national security issue for the United States. Being aware of this situation also explains why all recent American administrations have wanted to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.A., with only limited success.

 

Chip War is filled with these sorts of “how did we not know this?” stories and background. It also drives home as few other things I’ve read, how absolutely dependent we have become on computer chips, on the same level of importance as the oil and energy resources that drive our economy. It’s also a very enlightening history of the brilliant people, the companies and countries that have created and improved these magical little devices that are now embedded in so much of the smart environment in which we now live. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (2022). Richard V Reeves.

I recently read this truly excellent book by Richard Reeves, on a topic which the author mentions he was discouraged from writing about by several friends and professional colleagues, due to its extremely controversial nature.  

 

He wrote it anyway, and I'm very glad he did.  It's all about why and how men and boys, and a wide range of their contemporary problems and needs, require our attention and resources, and why neither the Left nor the Right are getting it right with respect to the difficulties faced by men in our society today.

Reeves anticipates the predictable feminist-oriented reaction against this position, and the assumption that he and his arguments are misanthropic and anti-women in nature, which they are not. At the outset, he states a number of important caveats about what he's not arguing for, principally the expectation that he hopes to preference the needs of men over women, and then moves on through chapter after chapter, exploring many ideas and the scientific research in support of the notion that we need to pay more attention to the plight of men and boys.

 

This is a book that needs to be read in its entirety, and the various pieces of the puzzle which he explores need to be seen together as a whole to be fully understood.  But here are just a few of the important points he considers.    
 

Boys and men have fallen behind in school and academics.  Women at this point, as a result of Title IX and 50 years of widespread governmental and institutional support, now succeed at a far higher percentage of the population in acquiring education in most subject areas than do men.  Why is this?  
 

Boys and men are also struggling in employment – despite the "glass ceiling" for women, and the predominance of men at the top of the corporate elite.  In fact, a significant number of young, able-bodied working age men have dropped out of the work world entirely, and are no longer in the labor pool, which has created major negative impacts in other areas of social life, such as family stability and lower availability of suitable or desirable mates for many women.  
 

Black boys and men, as distinct from males who are white or even in other ethnic groups, have a specially compounded set of problems caused by the legacy of slavery, systematic demonization of black men as a result of systemic racism, and widespread lack of functional fathers and male role models in many black families due to widespread imprisonment, welfare laws and other structural impediments put in place over many generations, which need particular focused attention and help.
 

Reeves then makes a strong case for something that on some levels, most of us accept, which is that human boys and men do have biologically-based differences from girls and women. This idea, seemingly so obvious, has actually been highly contested in some circles for the past 50 or more years, in service of the need and desire to remove sex-linked characteristics as the basis for discrimination against women.  

 

Reeves' analysis on this central topic is refreshing and insightful. Many of the differences between men and women that have been universally recognized and accepted over eons have actually been verified in much social research recently. As he points out, the stereotypical male tendencies and behaviors that are different from those of women are not "bugs" of masculinity.  They’re features, resulting from evolution, which in the past rewarded men for focusing on aspects of the needs of their families and communities which were different from those of women, due primarily to the men's lack of ability to bear children.

 

Reeves mentions common beliefs about the differences in men and women, such as that men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people, or that because men have more testosterone, that leads men to greater aggression, risk-taking, and more competitiveness, all features which play out over time as the evolutionary tools by which men struggle to be able to reproduce their genes, by gaining access to women's attentions and their bodies. 

But these differences aren’t (or shouldn't be) grounds for discrimination (as they have been in the past) – they’re simply tendencies that overlap between men and women, and appear in different proportions in each individual. This means that in a perfect world, for example, we still wouldn’t expect to see a perfect balance in the number of men and women in all employment fields or areas of interest.  

 

This point was a revelation to me -- that we shouldn't always strive or expect to see complete parity for example in male/female distributions within any particular profession, even if everyone has equal access to them. The distribution instead should mirror the averages of how interested each sex (as a group) is in that profession.

 

The point, as Reeves says, is to make it possible for all people to realize their best interests and capabilities.  Our lives and opportunities are not and should not be controlled by just our sex at birth, and the attributes that come with it. They are controlled instead by three different factors:  nature (what we're each born with), nurture (the training and support we receive), and our personal action and choices. 

 

We can encourage women in STEM, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the profession will ever be women -- as a part of the population, they probably are just not quite as interested in those fields as men.  But it might be 41%, and if so, they should have the opportunity to succeed, just as much as the men should. 
 

One important point that derives from all this in Reeves' view is that treating traditionally male characteristics as a “toxic” pathology is damaging to men, and it's wrong. Masculinity is only toxic when it doesn’t serve the greater good of the species, or isn’t under mature adult control.  No one ever says anything about “toxic femininity”. When harnessed correctly, masculinity is natural, a result of evolution, and of benefit to society.  One example of this would be the greater propensity of men to take personal risks in defense of others.  

 

In Reeves' view, the #METOO movement's use of the term "toxic masculinity" as a routine pejorative for men and the way they behave is demoralizing, too broad-brush, and doesn't take into account the negative psychological effect it has on the morale and self-image of many boys and men, especially young ones trying to understand how they are supposed to behave in the world, and what their self-worth is.
 

The author then points out the opposite side of recognizing the positive and natural value of masculinity, which is that men also have “female” characteristics in varying proportions, while many women also have varying proportions of "male" characteristics. Care-taking and nurturing tendencies, and greater social interest and engagement, exist in men too – just to a somewhat lesser degree on average.  Women similarly have aggressive, competitive and less social tendencies too, just to a somewhat lesser degree on average than the men.
 

The chapter on the politics of all this is particularly thoughtful and convincing.  Reeves asserts that the political left and the progressive/feminist ideologues need to recognize and accept that there are truly biological differences between men and women, and that admitting that is not a basis for justifying individual and systemic discrimination against women. Conversely, the political right, which has been capitalizing in recent years on reactionary anti-feminist feelings among many men, needs to realize that there’s no reclaiming the oppressive, hierarchical masculinity of yesteryear.  

 

The central challenge for all of us is to realize that it’s necessary to have both men and women adapt to the new reality of a society based on equality between men and women. It’s not a zero-sum game: we can support women and their rights, but also support the men too. But if the left (progressives) won’t deal with the very real problems and difficulties boys and men are currently facing in our society, then the opportunists and bad actors, recognizing the grievances and sense of loss that many men feel as their traditional roles have disappeared, will surely come up with their own bad solutions.  The rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic alt-right demonstrate this risk all too clearly. 
 

In the last part of the book, Reeves begins to try to pull together recommendations for what should be done to help boys and men succeed. He starts with the equitable and obvious claim that for the past 50 years in the United States, a great deal has been done to advance women’s health, rights and status in society, and that's good.  But nothing of the sort is being done for men, and it should be.
 

He suggests that we need to promote more men in the HEAL professions (health, education, and other social service fields),  just as women in STEM has been pushed.  We should get rid of the stigma of “women’s professions”, and open up more employment and career opportunities for men in these types of work, where they are needed and could have good careers. This might also improve pay scales for women in those professions.
 

One of his other innovative ideas for improving boys' outcomes in education and later life, which has drawn a lot of both positive comment and criticism, is what he calls "Redshirting" the boys – holding boys back a year (after the girls) in starting school.  He argues this would provide a significant positive effect on giving boys better results, because in general their intellectual development is delayed compared to girls (another biological difference between the sexes which recently has been well-established through research). 

 

Parents could still have the choice to opt out of a general system change like this, based on the needs of their particular children. And Reeves expresses willingness to hear other proposals to help with the uneven rate of brain development between boys and girls, relative to education.  But he's trying to start a discussion of how to help boys do better in an educational process which is currently stacked against them, compared to the girls -- a worthwhile and timely objective.

 

This book is a fascinating exploration of the situation of modern boys and men in America, and what they need to be successful and productive humans in a world shared more fairly with girls and women. It's full of important and genuinely humane proposals and insights to make things better for all of us, as we try to create a society where everyone can have a better chance to realize their own hopes and dreams, whether male or female. 

 

The book (and this review) may well be controversial, and challenge many peoples' thoughts and feelings about the relationship between the sexes, and their respective roles, but it is well worth taking the time to read it, and think more deeply about these issues in the light of contemporary science and social science research. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy (2023). Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.

This brand new non-fiction book combines the true story of a recent masterpiece of complex investigative journalism with revelations that are disturbing and important for all who value privacy, individual rights and democratic norms.

The authors are two noted French journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.  They are both leaders in a French non-profit journalism organization called Forbidden Stories, which seeks to continue the investigative work of assassinated reporters from many dangerous authoritarian countries around the world. To accomplish this mission, they make use of the skills of a team of their own organization's staff, who work in collaboration with top reporters and technical experts from major news media companies and human rights groups from many nations.

The target of the special investigation described in this book was an Israeli company called NSO. NSO was a high-tech security company that developed and sold surveillance tools to governments. Among their most valuable tools was a secret product known as Pegasus, a combination of spy software and hosted I.T. services which allowed their customers to hack into smartphones, and to use the compromised phones and their data in a variety of nefarious ways.

Pegasus enabled not only access to all the existing content (email, text, video, audio) on any  phone it compromised, but also the ability to plant data on it (such as child porn, or other fake evidence used to besmirch the phone owner’s reputation, and justify arrest and prosecution). It also allowed the cracker to activate the microphone and cameras on the phone remotely, to serve as an unintended bugging device against the phone's owner, as well as being able to use the phone's GPS information to track the phone's owner's location. And it enabled the cracker to interact with the phone in other ways too, to control it, and download a vast array of personal private information from it on demand.

The product was quietly sold to select governmental agencies in allied countries with the permission of the Israeli government. In the beginning, it was marketed and defended by NSO as a tool for democratic governments, primarily in the west, to defend themselves and their populations from terrorists and criminals, in response to the many new apps and tools for data encryption on Apple and Android phones. The ability to hack into suspects' phones appealed to worried law enforcement agencies and officials in many countries, who feared that new phone encryption apps would prevent them from being able to monitor and investigate lawbreakers effectively.

However, this positive spin on the purpose and uses of NSO's tools took a dark turn when Forbidden Stories obtained a list of over 10,000 phone numbers from a secret source (probably within the NSO company), from nations around the world, which had been hacked using Pegasus. 

It quickly became obvious from the journalists' initial review of the phone numbers on the list that NSO must also be selling the product to repressive regimes and unsavory leaders in many places, to allow those dangerous customers to surveil, monitor and track individuals who were considered a threat to them or to their regime(s).  Pegasus suddenly looked to be a terrifyingly powerful new weapon for authoritarian dictatorships hunting dissidents, and seeking to silence or punish political opponents and inquisitive reporters.

Once Forbidden Stories realized the threat posed by the existence and sale of this tool, to them as journalists as well as to anyone who might fear the sort of all-knowing governmental surveillance and targeting made possible by Pegasus, they set to work on trying to find out more about it. To do that, they had to slowly and carefully build a wide network of respected journalists and media outlets in many countries, who would contribute to a large group investigative journalism project, but under very strict security restrictions.

One of the greatest risks to the project, and to the journalists working on it, was that each of their own smartphones might become a potential source of leaks that could blow the story wide open, before they were able to complete the deep and wide research needed to document it. Indeed, just by tracing the owners of many of the phone numbers on the list, the journalists working on the project quickly discovered that some of their own phones had already been hacked by Pegasus customers from repressive regimes.  

The reporters, computer experts and Forbidden Stories project organizers thus had to find ways to do their work, coordinate all their efforts and handle communications among participants on different continents, over a period of many months, without relying on the most common tools of their trade, the ones we all take for granted now – their phones and the internet.  This made their achievements all the more difficult, and their success that much more astonishing.

This is a truly disturbing, but impressive and thoroughly researched story on how a voluntary network of idealistic journalists around the globe pieced together the truth about a set of repressive surveillance tools, aimed directly at our smartphones, that could destroy the ability of anyone to trust in their own personal safety or security from malevolent governments and criminals anywhere in the world.  Having managed to uncover and document the story in astonishing detail, they then made it public, with a highly synchronized barrage of stories from many reporters in different places, with each report addressing the local instances and effects of the Pegasus spyware and operations in their many respective countries.  

The fact that Forbidden Stories' investigation, and its revelations, ultimately drove NSO out of its very lucrative phone spyware business is encouraging, but only somewhat. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, we still have to recognize how relatively easy it is to create spyware systems like Pegasus, tools that can use all the wonderful technological capabilities of our smartphones against us. The authors suggest we need to try to prepare for the next time in advance, by passing laws to try to limit or prevent development of these kinds of Orwellian surveillance technologies in the future.

This is an exciting real-world thriller of investigative journalism, combined with a vital cautionary tale about the threats to freedom and privacy posed by our ubiquitous smartphone technology. It includes a powerful and enlightening introduction by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath (2022). Bill Browder.

In 2015, Bill Browder, a young businessman and major Western investor in Russia during the early post-Soviet era, published a bestselling autobiography called Red Notice (previously reviewed here). It described how his harrowing experiences in Russia at the hands of the Putin authoritarian and kleptocratic government had led him to become the chief advocate for the passage of The Magnitsky Act by Congress.

The Magnitsky Act was named for one of Browder’s Russian lawyers and friends who had been murdered in jail by the Putin government after being falsely accused of various financial crimes committed by members of Putin’s own circle. The act gives the U.S. government the legal authority to freeze and confiscate the funds of human rights abusers, and has been used extensively against Russian oligarchs, members of the Putin government, and other autocrats of the post-Soviet world, most recently in connection with the illegal Russian war in Ukraine.

Browder’s new book Freezing Order is the excellent and heart-pounding true life sequel to the story he began in Red Notice seven years ago. Red Notice ended with him having successfully worked with Congressional leaders from both parties to enact the Magnitsky Act, which immediately put him at the top of Vladimir Putin’s enemies list. Freezing Order picks up the story with Browder’s next efforts to convince the leaders of other governments around the world to pass their own versions of the Magnitsky Act in their countries.

Since February, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, we have had an ongoing public demonstration of the types of terrorism and cold-blooded brutality that Vladimir Putin is willing and able to unleash against his enemies. But Browder has experienced it repeatedly in his own personal life, as close friends and associates were poisoned, imprisoned and murdered, and as he increasingly has had to dodge and counter personal attacks on himself, including disinformation campaigns, lawsuits, death threats, in absentia convictions in Russia for crimes falsely attributed to him, and Russian attempts to use Interpol and other dark operations to capture him and extradite him back to Russia.

In one of the most chilling personal accounts of the dangers posed by the presidency of Donald Trump, he recounts his fears of being arrested and shipped off to Russia by Trump when Putin proposed that very idea at the notorious 2017 Helsinki conference, as a “fair” response to the American indictment of twelve Russian agents by Robert Mueller. Browder also provides detailed accounts of his own relationship to and knowledge of numerous of the Russian bad actors eventually identified in the context of the strange Trump/Putin relationship and the Mueller investigation.

One of the most important points Browder makes is that Vladimir Putin loves money. In furtherance of those desires, Putin and his cronies for years have run sophisticated worldwide criminal operations to steal from their own people, confiscate the assets and proceeds of Russian companies under fraudulent pretexts, and then export and hide the vast amounts – Browder suggests over $1 trillion – via complex, sophisticated money laundering operations.

But as victims, journalists and western government investigators have increasingly exposed, and by use of Magnitsky Acts in many countries confiscated the fruits of this theft, Putin has felt increasingly threatened and frustrated by the outside world. Browder suggests that the growing effect of these confiscatory efforts against oligarchs and human rights abusers has played a large part in driving Putin to his desperate war on Ukraine, and helps explain many of the other signs he has displayed of his hatred for and fear of the West.

It would be challenging to write a spy thriller with more devious plot twists and turns, unexpected dangers, and covert murder and mayhem. But this is an inspiring real-life story, with a crusading human rights advocate fighting for truth and justice against a criminal tyrant, while trying to survive a relentless covert campaign to stop him at every turn. It’s gripping, informative and very relevant to the current historical and geopolitical situation. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (2021). Tom Nichols.

As you’ll recall, just last week, I did an “Honorable Mentions” post on five books about authoritarianism, democracy and recent politics. Coincidentally, though, this week I read another such book, but one with a very different outlook than most of the other ones.

Our Own Worst Enemy, written by a professor at the Naval War College, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other periodicals, turns the focus mostly away from the bad actors and would-be authoritarians whose attempts to undermine democracy here and abroad have held so much of our attention over the past several years. Instead, he argues that “we the people” need to take a hard look at ourselves and our discontents to understand why our politics have reached such a sorry state.

Nichols makes a number of interesting points that have the ring of truth about them. He begins with a well-supported assertion that we are living in a time of material abundance and technological accomplishment beyond anything humans have ever known before, where even the poor take for granted wealth and technology undreamed of by humans in the past. Despite that reality, many of us are obsessively unhappy, and focus mainly on what we perceive as constant losses and social decline (much of which is non-existent) rather than the relatively bountiful conditions all around us. This reflexive dissatisfaction, and the fear of loss, are powerful emotions, and ones easily manipulated by cynical political actors.

The author talks about the growing epidemic of narcissism, now amplified by social media, where more and more of us are focused mainly on ourselves, our own desires, and our appearance to the rest of the world. He contrasts the selfishness of the narcissistic personality with the kind of outward-looking, modest, generous and compassionate personality which is at the core of democratic behavior, and a democratic society. A successful democracy requires that we regularly show compassion and tolerance for others, including strangers, but he suggests that more of us now have little use for or concern for anyone outside of ourselves and our immediate family.

Another observation he makes has to do with boredom. He suggests that our democracy may be a victim of its own success, in creating such freedom and abundant wealth, combined with the endless passive entertainment we consume, that many of us don’t know what to do to find meaning and fulfillment. This is another void in ourselves which is ripe for manipulation by con men and hucksters (on both ends of the political spectrum), who know how to whip up enthusiasm and excitement in a bored population by appealing to imaginary threats and fears.

Several writers have recently noted the apparent vibrancy of Ukrainian democracy under threat from the Russian invasion, as compared with our angry and polarized society. The difference seems to lie in the fact that for Ukraine, the whole society is now united by the excitement, the shared threats and privations, and the clear and present danger posed to their freedom and lives by Putin’s invasion. We don’t share any such feelings of common destiny or meaning in the face of an unambiguous threat (a feeling probably last experienced here in World War II), particularly since we rely on a paid volunteer military populated by only a few of us for our common defense.  Instead we divide into factions and tribes, and allow our discontents to be nurtured by those groups and individuals, from politics to finance to media, who can profit from our antipathies toward each other.

Nichols also spends some time on the extent to which many citizens of the United States are too uninformed about policy and political issues to be able to make reasoned, rationally consistent judgments when it comes time to vote. As a case study, he looks at the significant group of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. A comparison of the programs of the two candidates, and their respective parties, reveals little overlap in the ideologies and programs advanced by the two parties or the candidates. Yet this group of voters willingly moved their support from one side to the other apparently based on celebrity, “excitement” factors and emotional “feelings”, and the public images of the two candidates, rather than the sorts of policies they embraced, and would attempt to enact if elected.

One other item considered by the author is the growth and active promotion of “resentment” in politics, where increasingly people will act against their own interests in order to make sure that someone else doesn’t get something, and who perceive loss and humiliation in every event that benefits anyone else. Much of this he lays at the feet of social media and our entertainment industry, which stokes our own envy continuously by feeding us idealized images of other people apparently having things we might not have. 

The author himself worries through all this that he is engaged in “moral hectoring”, and perhaps he is, but nevertheless, in his call for us to look deeply at ourselves as well as others in trying to understand and hopefully ease the woes of our contemporary polarized democracy, he is making a vital appeal. It's one we should listen to and reflect upon. Recommended.