Unmasking the Blurred Lines Regulating the Foreign Intelligence and Domestic Surveillance Activities of the United States

• Author: Kristine B. Mullendore
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12823
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

Book Reviews 791

Kristine B. Mullendore is professor

of criminal justice and legal studies in the

School of Criminal Justice at Grand Valley

State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

She received her Juris Doctorate degree

from Boston University School of Law in

1977. She worked for more than 12 years

as assistant prosecuting attorney for Kent

County, Michigan. She teaches legal and

criminal justice courses and publishes

articles on a diverse range of public policies,

including technology-related legal issues.

E-mail: mullendk@gvsu.edu

Anthony Gregory , American Surveillance: Intelligence,

Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment ( Madison :

University of Wisconsin Press , 2016 ) . 263 pp. $44.95

(cloth), ISBN: 9780299308803.

E ven before the official formation of the United

States of America, those who would in the

future serve as governing officials engaged in

the secret collection of information about the nation ’ s

enemies and friends, and similar activities continue to

date. Anthony Gregory ’ s book, American Surveillance ,

provides a complex historical tapestry and detailed

discussions of the political and military choices

regarding surveillance activities, their consequences,

and the ever-evolving legal policy choices. He provides

those who are not experts with new perspectives of the

U.S. government ’ s engagement in foreign intelligence

and domestic surveillance with a multidimensional

and layered analysis of historical events, political and

military decisions, legislative acts with their judicial

interpretation, executive branch administration, and

the economic forces that are always at play in the

background. He focuses on identifying the historical

events that place pressure on policy makers who are

balancing the competing values of privacy and national

security. The intelligence failures that occurred prior

to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 vividly illustrate the

type of pressure imposed on public servants who must

balance these values. The historical context of these

and other highlighted security crises and pressure

points enriches the discussion of both the political and

legal decisions of U.S. government officials, dating

back to the critical roles of information gathering,

and disinformation dissemination activities of the

spy ring of then General George Washington during

the Revolutionary War and continuing through the

surveillance policies enacted post-9/11.

The current media coverage and commentator

dissection of President Trump ’ s March 4, 2017, tweet

alleging that that the Obama administration had

tapped his phones during the election underlines the

importance of examining the domestic surveillance

and foreign intelligence policies such as that provided

by Gregory (Huetteman and Rosenberg 2017 ). Public

awareness of the government ’ s ability to both intrude

into their private domestic conversations and of these

protective provisions was most likely heightened by the

news reports concerning the role of Obama ’ s National

Security Adviser Susan Rice in “unmasking” the identity

of Trump campaign officials (Boylan and Taylor 2017 ),

further reinforcing the timeliness of Gregory ’ s scholarly

examination of the political, legal, and economic roots

of these current events. In his foreword, Gregory, who

is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, shares

that his original intent was to write about the National

Security Agency (NSA), the agency that was headed by

Susan Rice, and that the work morphed into something

else. The NSA ’ s political roots, organizational structure

and existence, and intelligence activities still play a

leading role in his examination of the U.S. government ’ s

security apparatus. Broadening his focus beyond

the NSA extends his scope to include the domestic

surveillance activities for collecting evidence by the

various domestic law enforcement agencies and the

regulation of those activities.

The legislative framework regulating these activities

is an extremely complicated patchwork of statutes

enacted in response to changes in executive branch

administration and policy reactions to historical

events. However, any examination of these activities

should emphasize that the most fundamental

distinction between these is that the domestic

surveillance activities of law enforcement agencies are

for collecting evidence for use in court while other

agency intelligence activities collect information for

national security purposes.

Gregory explores the congressional use of a “domestic”

and “foreign” dichotomy to define the scope of

executive agency use of intrusive investigative

techniques to collect security information while

struggling to uphold the privacy protections provided to

persons in the United States by the U.S. Constitution ’ s

Fourth Amendment. Gregory sees these activities

Danny L. Balfour, Editor

Kristine B. Mullendore

Grand Valley State University

Unmasking the Blurred Lines Regulating the

Foreign Intelligence and Domestic Surveillance

Activities of the United States

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 791–794. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12823.