Series in Piracy
Books in Piracy
Glory Boys
January 1942, and the crew of MGB 194 return from leave to find their gunboat allocated to a different flotilla. And new men have joined; fresh faces who must earn the title of shipmate, while some may not be all they seem… But the action is hotting up off the South Coast of England; all too soon they meet with the enemy in the worst of circumstances while a later secondment involves them in one of the most audacious raids in history. With captivating historical detail, tense naval action and gripping personnel dynamics, Bond gives an insight into British Coastal Forces during WW2; its light, powerful, but ultimately vulnerable craft, and the men that sailed them: the Glory Boys.
Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America
Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of digital data When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics? To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public’s right to know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant’s thinking to propose a digital “right to opacity.” As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a “postsecret” society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals. Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of “the good,” of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data.