The recent hearing on Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence inspires some observations on surveillance and society in the form of a book review.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (Duke University Press, 2018) is Katherine Verdery’s memoir of decades of anthropological fieldwork in Romania delivered through the lens of her later discovery that she was tracked by the country’s security service as a spy. The book illustrates the deeply corrosive effects of state surveillance on her life, her work, and her relationships in Romania. (State surveillance was a social cancer to Romanians themselves, of course.)

This is a good and still-timely reminder of the ills of communism. But I don’t take its lessons as chiefly historical or ideological. Verdery’s anthropology says things about surveillance generally.

The sickness in Romanian society under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu puts My Life as a Spy in a category led by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Verdery recounts nothing so coarse as the perversities of bureaucratized punishment and death in the mid-20th-century Soviet Union. But there are familiar refrains. The Securitate, Romania’s secretive state security service, procured informers across society through the ’70s and ’80s. They did so by threatening indeterminate punishments for legal lapses or by ascribing the political wrongs of relatives and associates to the people they targeted for recruitment. Once recruited, informers were bound to the Securitate by shame. Exposure would make them social pariahs.

Comprehensive secrecy created a gnawing awareness that anyone could be an informer. When I was a student in newly independent Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, only Americans spoke on the subway. The poisonous social dynamics of informing had silenced the Czechs.

Much of the book is a simple recounting of her work, animated by later access to her security files. But in the latter part of the book, Verdery observes the institutional and personal incentives behind state surveillance. In a particularly insightful short section called “The Target Function,” Verdery describes her manufactured spy identity as fulfilling a need of the security apparatus. They identified her as a spy, overlooked contrary evidence and conclusions, continued to recruit informers around her, and never expelled her from the country or refused her reentry—because they needed her. They needed threats like her to maintain their roles, budgets, prestige, and power.

Students of bureaucratic incentives will find this familiar. In Secrecy: The American Experience (1998), Daniel Patrick Moynihan criticized secrecy as a security tool. Drawing on his experiences as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, he asserts that secrecy leaves policymakers less informed, denies government accountability, and sharply limits public debate about policy and government conduct.

There are differences between the mostly human intelligence methods of Romania in the late 20th century and the surveillance of today. Labor-intensive, informer-based surveillance relied on “manipulating the target’s social relations, fouling them with deceit,” Verdery says. This was, of course, damaging to her ethnography. Modern surveillance does not overtly foul social relationships “but instead simply maps those relationships to discern potentially treacherous patterns.” There is some fouling, of course. We joke darkly about what is “between you, me, and the NSA” when we talk about sensitive subjects on the phone. In current political discourse, of course, reflecting some reality, we have our “Deep State.”

“We will know more about the experience of high-tech surveillance once we gain access to our National Security Administration [sic], Facebook, and other files,” Verdery says. “Perhaps my stories here will prepare my readers somewhat for that inevitable disturbing moment.” She will not be caught oblivious to her role as a target of surveillance again.

So I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see Gabbard asked again and again in her hearing to affirm support for Section 702, the statute authorizing mass, warrantless surveillance of all types of electronic communications. (You’ll find it characterized differently among publications by the intelligence community and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on one hand, and the American Civil Liberties Union or Electronic Frontier Foundation on the other. The Congressional Research Service might be a neutral source.)

I perceive Gabbard’s hearing as illustrating an inversion of a sort. Our political leaders are more aggressively defensive of secret government programs, where they should be sheepish, dubious, and inquisitive. Secrecy’s weakness as a security tool and its high costs to democratic accountability should be a source of collective embarrassment and concern. Gabbard’s past questioning of programs like 702 should be a welcome sign that fresh eyes may oversee the intelligence community in the Trump administration.

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