The Watchers

How the Secret Police Shape the Future

A chilling account of the modern police state—from a journalist once spied upon in Cold War Europe.

A chilling account of the modern police state—from a journalist once spied upon in Cold War Europe.

How much freedom must we surrender to feel safe? Is China’s AI-enhanced total surveillance becoming a model for other countries? Could cascading fears about failing states steer citizens towards accepting repression, even in well-established democracies?

Tracing the police state’s history from Nazi Germany to Cuba to the Eastern Bloc, Roger Boyes demonstrates the enduring centrality of censorship and mass surveillance to authoritarian states like North Korea, China and Russia today. But America, too, is increasingly employing police-state methods to deport migrants en masse, and democratic guardrails and judicial independence globally are being eroded. Boyes speaks with the secret police’s victims and insiders, from former inmates of Iran’s Evin Prison to Hongkongers fighting for democracy. And he tracks down those who informed on him when he was a correspondent in East Germany and martial-law Poland to explore the motives of willing accomplices.

As the boundaries between external warfare and domestic control blur, Boyes offers a timely, indispensable examination of the police state’s seemingly unstoppable rise.

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