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🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, the podcast where books meet big ideas and you’re tuned in to our latest episode: Weekend Book Review.
📚 Today, we're cracking open a book that reads like a spy thriller, but hits like a legal exposé. It's Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks by Bernard Keenan, published just this week by The MIT Press as part of their History and Foundations of Information Science series.
Now, Keenan isn't your typical academic locked in an ivory tower. 🧠He's Assistant Professor at University College London's Faculty of Laws, and he works right at the intersection of law, technology, and society — that sticky web where your text messages, your emails, maybe even this podcast stream could become data points in a sprawling surveillance system.
📡 Interception takes us on a shadowy journey through time — from dusty 17th-century post offices where letters were secretly opened "for the good of the state," to satellites orbiting overhead and fiber-optic cables pulsing with information. But here’s the kicker: this isn't just about Britain. It’s a global entanglement of networks, laws, and secret alliances, with names like UKUSA and echoes of Edward Snowden.
And Keenan asks the question we can't ignore: When governments intercept our messages, who really holds the power — and how did it get this way?
Before we get to the heart of this review, a huge thank you to Bernard Keenan and The MIT Press for making Interception available as open access. That’s right — no paywalls, no barriers. Just powerful ideas, freely shared. 🙏
🎧 If you like where this is going, hit that subscribe button on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also watch and engage with us on the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. And yes, we’re streaming on Amazon Prime Music too.
So, here's the question we’re chasing this weekend:
🔍 What happens when the tools that connect us become the very mechanisms that control us?
Let’s dive in. 📖
Reference
Keenan, B. (2025). Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks. The MIT Press https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15654.001.0001
Open Access Book PDF available here
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https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher
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