Question

urgently pls brothers/sisters
a short book review on any topic

Answer 1

Ted Chiang – Stories Of Your Life And Others

Yes, it’s that collection that contains the original story that the film Arrival was based on. Yes, that’s why I bought it.

It is a grand, wonderful combination of the incredibly complex, the maddeningly infuriating and the genuinely brilliant. In some places the stories are SF, some speculative, one story is even set at the Tower Of Babylon…

I rarely remember the last time I came across an SF author who challenged me so much and that, in itself, is enough to make me love this.

Answer 2

Review of Loch Johnson’s “Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States” (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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There are abundant recent examples of Congress exercising its constitutional prerogative to oversee the work of America’s vast intelligence enterprise. Some of them are good; many others, bad; and several, truly ugly.

In the most promising case, the Senate intelligence committee has been undertaking what, as of this publishing, has been a bipartisan investigation into Russia’s “active measures” aimed at influencing the 2016 presidential election. We should recall, however, that only four years ago this same committee fractured along party lines and could not agree on either the facts or the policy lessons from the Central Intelligence Agency’s long-defunct rendition, detention and interrogation program. And “ugly” is the only fair description of the current state of the House intelligence committee and its doings. The partisan antics of its chairman (apparently at White House direction) has effectively disqualified this committee from playing any serious role in the Russia investigation and they invite skeptics to question the very principle of legislative oversight of secret intelligence activities.

For readers of Loch Johnson’s new book, “Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States,” the central question is whether the revelation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election (or, perhaps, our inability to detect and disrupt it) constituted a sufficiently unsettling “shock” so as to trigger a “firefighting” response by Congress. In that case, the oversight model proposed by Johnson would predict a short and well-publicized investigation, followed by a period of “high intensity [police] patrolling” to prevent a recurrence.

Depending on the severity of the shock, Congress might even legislate new structures or procedures to address a continuing threat. This “firefighting” model of intelligence oversight and accountability further anticipates, however, that congressional attention will inevitably shift to new priorities; diligent monitoring will lapse, setting the stage for the next scandal and spasm of oversight. Even casual students of U.S. intelligence history and Congress’s record in regulating our security institutions will recognize this pattern.

“Spy Watching” is an impressive, even encyclopedic, review of America’s experience regulating its large, powerful, and compulsively secretive intelligence agencies. The book’s subtitle implies a broader study of “intelligence accountability,” but “Spy Watching” focuses almost exclusively on Congress. Johnson describes the “benign neglect” of oversight by congressional barons in the first decades after the modern intelligence community was established in 1947, followed by 1975, the “Year of Intelligence,” when widespread improprieties were exposed by the Church and Pike committee investigations; and, finally, the “experiment in rigorous intelligence accountability” that began in the wake of those congressional hearings and continues to this day. Johnson is eminently qualified to undertake this study—a highly-regarded professor, author, journal editor, and icon in the small but growing academic discipline of intelligence studies. He served on the staff of the Church Committee and subsequently helped design the modern oversight architecture. He succinctly describes the book’s goal as judging whether “the intelligence reforms instituted in the 1970’s worked.”

After providing a comprehensive account of congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence from 1947 to the present, Johnson introduces his “Shock Theory of Intelligence Accountability”—what this review’s opening alluded to as a “firefighting” model of oversight. “Firefighting” is only one category of accountability in Johnson’s analytic framework. It stands in contrast with “policing.” These are useful devices for characterizing the approaches taken by congressional overseers: they tend to act either as “policemen” who routinely patrol to deter crime or, alternatively, as “firemen” who respond only to urgent alarms mostly after the conflagration is underway.

Johnson employs this framework to analyze both the stimuli and oversight responses to America’s major intelligence scandals. Unsurprisingly, his analysis confirms that the Senate and House intelligence committees function most reliably as firefighters and only rarely as policemen. He concludes that the trigger for intensive investigation by these committees is sustained media attention, although Johnson acknowledges that leaks in recent years of electronic surveillance programs by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden fueled months of front-page reporting but generated only a modest legislative response.