“Someday most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance,” writes Arthur Holland Michel in Eyes in the Sky, a startling, disturbing, and deeply reported account of the powerful new technologies that promise safety and imperil privacy on an unprecedented scale. Imagine an aerial video...
Category: Reviews
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The FBI’s War on MLK and What It Means Today
The Double Exposure documentary film festival has several provocative offerings on the world of intelligence and spying. Coming on October 16: MLK/FBI is the first film to uncover the extent of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on newly discovered and declassified files, utilizing a trove of documents obtained...
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The Improbable But True Story of Two Female Assassins from North Korea
The spectacularly brazen murder of King Jong-nam happened in broad daylight, filmed entirely by security cameras. Footage showed two young women approaching Jong-nam from behind, covering his eyes with their hands, and pressing VX—the most lethal nerve gas on earth—into his eyes. He stumbled away and was dead within an hour. The documentary film, Assassins,...
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‘Last Narc’: How the CIA Did Business With Drug Traffickers
Former Newsweek correspondent and best-selling author Elaine Shannon tries but doesn’t quite succeed in taking down Amazon’s series “The Last Narc.” In an extended take out for SpyTalk, Shannon quotes an impressive series of former U.S. officials who scoff at the premise of the series. But neither she nor her sources mention the story of...
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SpyTalk Review of Books and Movies
In SpyTalk, veteran intelligence reporter Jeff Stein reviews a diverse slew of recent books in the realm of espionage and national security. Three recommendations A Hollywood feature on The Trial of the Chicago Seven, coming October 16, starring Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Sacha Baron Cohen and Frank Langella, among others, as the colorful anti-Vietnam War defendants, their lawyers and...