My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance

In this excerpt from his book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, John Goldsmith considers the private costs of the invasive surveillance tactics the US government uses against its own citizens. “It wasn’t just the chilling effect on Chuckie’s freedom of thought, belief, and speech—an effect that stretched back decades, to the 1950s, when he first began to suspect that he was under surveillance. It was also, more painfully, the violence against his intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus of his power to define and shape his life.”