October 1, 2022
A New York magazine features writer who authored the multi-best-booked Thrown, Howley takes readers on a raucous ride through the shadowy deep state by following the adventures of an anonymous young NSA analyst who sneaked a state secret out of the office. Along the way, she limns the death of privacy in today's world and how we are ruled by data.
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January 16, 2023
In this fascinating dispatch from the height of the surveillance age, Howley (Thrown) expands on her New York magazine profile of Reality Winner, the intelligence specialist who leaked classified reports on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Born in Texas in 1991, Winner was a “comically mature adolescent... with a compulsive drive to improve herself.” Skilled with foreign languages, she joined the Air Force after high school and learned Dari, Pashto, and Farsi; assigned to the drone program, she sat “in a cubicle in Maryland and eavesdropped on Pakistani men day after day.” After her honorable discharge from the military, Winner was hired by an NSA contractor to translate intercepted communications related to Iran’s aerospace program. Her security clearance gave her access to a top-secret report on Russian efforts to hack into U.S. election systems, which she leaked to the Intercept in 2017. Based on extensive interviews with Winner, her family, and her friends, and enriched by incisive character sketches of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other whistleblowers, Howley reveals how the gravest threat to the national security state has become “ideological, morally serious twentysomethings finding themselves as they sifted through secrets their younger selves had promised to keep.” Witty, humane, and fiercely intelligent, this is a striking critique of a world intent on “burying itself” in information.
January 15, 2023
A provocative look at the culture of intelligence and its subversions. "The thing on which you will one day focus all of your anxiety is not the thing you know, today, to fear," writes New York magazine feature writer Howley. Today, many Americans fear immigration along the border. While the majority of Americans loath the idea of a border wall for political and aesthetic reasons, an architect goes deeper, remarking that the thought of a no-wall world is a Protestant one, "an idea against ethnic clannishness." Instead of tribalism, we fear terrorism, at least the foreign variety, and have built a huge intelligence machine to try to contain it. As Howley reckons, a petabyte of data, printed out, would fill 24 million filing cabinets, and "at one intelligence agency, one petabyte of classified data accumulates every year and a half." This amassed data is barely skimmed, and only a handful of specialists know enough to determine what's secret and not. Enter leakers such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner, all of whom were young: "None of them had hit thirty-one on the day they blew the whistle." What prompted them to release that classified data to outlets such as the morally ambiguous Julian Assange was partly because they had time on their hands, partly because security procedures were lax, but mostly, it seems, because they were convinced that the data revealed evil. Conspiracy theory underlies their work, but it's better supported than the QAnon-ish theories that give Howley her book's title. In all events, notes the author, whereas it used to take the CIA, FBI, or other government agency to ferret out crimes, in the modern culture of self-promotion, people such as the Jan. 6 rioters now gladly out themselves: "Somewhere along the way we had lost the knack for anonymity." Pair this book with Matthew Connelly's The Declassification Engine. A literate, readable meditation on the surveillance state and its discontents.
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February 15, 2023
In this wide-ranging, often chilling survey, Howley (Thrown, 2014) meditates on the ways in which data collected by U.S. government agencies can be used to invade and destroy the lives of citizens. At the heart of her expos� is Reality Winner ("Her real name, let's move past it now"). Winner served as a linguist and surveillance expert with a high security clearance in the U.S. Air Force, and then as a consultant in a firm from which she leaked a document about possible Russian interference in the U.S. elections--a leak that earned her the longest sentence ever handed down for an Espionage Act conviction. In a sometimes rambling but always provocative narrative, which also covers "American Taliban" member John Walker Lindh and others accused of espionage, Howley makes a convincing argument that Winner was convicted less for the leak than for misleading evidence from old social media posts and personal texts, written playfully but interpreted as serious, and suggests that we all might be subject to danger from the same sort of posts, preserved without our knowledge in government databases.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.