Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

An excellent, moving, scary book. The humanity of the telling is raw. Flawed humans coming up against the worst of dehumanizing forces. All the stupidities and waste and kafkaesque cruelty generated and powered by our own hand: our data, our data about our data is so massive and relentless there is no escape. One merely hopes that their data never has a reason to surface.

The evolution of the modern surveillance state, told as a series of profiles of protagonists, victims and bystanders (sometimes all at once). I have some personal experience in this arena - I was a military linguist some 50 years ago and worked for the NSA. The best summary I can give you is a conversation I overheard between my grandchildren, long before this book came out (but after the Snowden affair) . We were driving them home after a weekend and my youngest (at the time) grandson was waxing eloquent on UFO's, how they were constantly watching us and noting everything we see, do and say. He was quite a fan of "Mysteries of the Unexplained" and such. My eldest granddaughter was listening but looking somewhat exasperated - she was show more more of a news junkie. Finally she could take it no more, turned to her brother and said, "Christian, they're just aliens! They're not the NSA!"
She wasn't wrong. show less

I’m not sure what this book is about. It has been written in a haphazard way, both structurally and at the sentence level. The author seems to have a cabinet full of axes to grind. No arguments are made, there is just reportage with the author’s opinion made either explicitly by simple statement, or much more often implicitly by the images created from what is sometimes unrelated material. The core of the book is the story of the Reality Winner espionage case. Introductory portions of the book are sporadically about Julian Assange, John Lindh, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and the dark activities of our intelligence services. I suppose that these serve to set the stage for Reality Winner, or to show us the environment that she show more was living in. The author thinks (or perhaps feels is better) that torture is bad, that prison is bad, apparently that people come as good or bad, that medical personnel are often condescending, that our privacy has been destroyed by the internet and the NSA, and that if you are arrested and people don’t like you, then you will be abused one way or another. I wouldn’t argue that any of these are untrue, but if you worked for the government for years and have access to classified material, I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t know that giving classified material to the internet media is a felony. The author seems to be defending Reality Winner based on statements that the Espionage Act was usually not enforced for the crime that Winner committed, that the FBI interrogated her inappropriately, that she was naive, that she was arrested at a bad time politically, that she was arrested while a fascist was the president, and that she was not a spy of any sort but a kind of whistle-blower. I guess I don’t disagree with anything in particular; I just found the whole construction to be mildly irritating and it disturbed my chi. Also, if you examine what our intelligence services did after President Bush and Congress pandered to their own fears after 9/11, you will be opening a very black box indeed. show less

Howley’s main subject here is Reality Winner, to me the most compelling of the notorious espionage cases of the past 10-15 years (along with Snowden, Manning, Assange). She starts at 9/11/2001 and rambles quite a bit before and after getting to Winner’s case, over subjects from drone surveillance and warfare through civil liberties in the digital era to Big Copyright and gonzo right-wing media (InfoWars, the hilarious video of the title), but it’s all interesting. I’m glad somebody has told Reality Winner’s story, well.