Surveillance is made of dogs. It’s also made of us. In Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, Kerry Howley dives into what surveillance is, what stories are told with intelligence data, and, ultimately, how the brunt of state power falls on whistleblowers.
Surveillance looks like us
In Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, Howley explores the physicality of surveillance, writing about what the labyrinth of electrons and tubes – and yes, guard dogs – looks like. “Data is physical,” Howley writes. “It can therefore be confronted.” Data exists in networks of electrons stored in massive computer banks, with the incidentally collected data of US people stored alongside vast troves of foreign surveillance data. The deep state has a physical imprint that journalist Dana Priest terms an alternative architecture. DC office building directories are missing floors. In Langley at CIA headquarters, there is a memorial wall featuring stars without names, for undercover agents killed in action whose identities were never revealed.
We are made real in part by our data, Howley argues. Our connections to others, laid bare in signals intelligence metadata, tell their own story. “We want to believe we exist in what we choose to say, but this overstates our autonomy; we are at least as realized in our connections to other people,” Howley writes. Metadata has a distancing quality; our three-letter agencies hang their hats on an inability to read the content of our...
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