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This announcement came to us from our friend Jonathan Adler, and this sounds like an event well worth attending.  I’ll be there if I can – Vern.  Here’s Jonathan:

Robert Scheer doesn’t come to OC often for a talk, Q & A, and book sale/signing. I invite you this Tuesday evening May 5 to Laguna Woods Clubhouse 5 for his talk and new book, both titled “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.”  Doors open 6:00 pm; buy his new and prior books; he’ll sign them from 6:30 until the program starts at 7:00, and also after it ends.   Concerned Citizens members free, guests $3.

Robert Scheer’s insights, witty delivery, and provocative views make for an evening you won’t forget!

Leading figures rave about his new book:

“Robert Scheer reminds us that privacy is everything –  the protector of our liberty . . . With clarity and precision,  [he] dissects the military-intelligence complex, showing it  to be neither very secure nor very intelligent, but, rather,  dangerous to us all.”
– Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley

“ ‘They Know Everything About You’ is a brilliant book.  Robert Scheer, who covered my 1971 trial after I released the Pentagon Papers . . . is a key voice and his  book . . . is an indispensable text for our time.”
– Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers author

“Robert Scheer has . . . issued a clarion call in these pages, lest we unwittingly click-away our freedom.”
– John Dean, bestselling author, former counsel to Pres. Nixon

Robert Scheer is Editor of Truthdig, the Webby Award-winning online magazine, and nationally syndicated in publications such as The Nation, Huffington Post and many newspapers. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over decades as a journalist. He was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine from 1964 to 1969, L.A. Times national correspondent from 1976 to 1993, and its syndicated columnist and contributing editor the next 12 years. Author of 10 books, he interviewed every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. His experience as a reporter, editor, and candidate for office makes him uniquely able to guide a journey across the landscape of progressive issues. He is now a clinical professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  [Vern adds:  Remember him being unceremoniously fired from the Times in 2005, in what seemed like a craven capitulation to the Bush-Cheney war machine?  I do.]

MORE…. from the press package….

In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore.

But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Big business has long played a leading role in the hollowing out of personal freedoms. In THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU, Robert Scheer shows how our most intimate habits, from private correspondence, book pages read, and lists of friends and phone conversations have been seamlessly combined in order to create a detailed map of an individual’s social and biological DNA.

From wiretapping to lax social media security, from domestic spy drones to sophisticated biometrics, both the United States government and private corporate interests have dangerously undermined the delicate balance between national security and individual sovereignty.

The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of the sovereignty of the individual—“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”—is being treated as an irrelevant relic of a bygone civilization.

Without privacy, Scheer argues, there is neither freedom nor democracy. The freedom to be left alone embodies the most basic of human rights. Yet this freedom has been squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.

WE MUST CHALLENGE THE ASSUMPTION that protecting national security requires sacrificing the constitutional rights of the individual. The technology of surveillance, Scheer warns, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.

Directions and Gate Pass