Author Patrick Radden Keefe is keeping an eye on electronic intelligence gathering
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | March 5, 2005
Six years ago, when Patrick Radden Keefe was a graduate student at Cambridge University in England, he happened upon British newspaper stories that mentioned an international surveillance network with the code name Echelon. Intrigued, he immersed himself in the subject.
"It's one of those classic stories where I got clips from the newspaper and suddenly there's a handful of articles and suddenly I need a new folder and then it's a file cabinet," Keefe says. "The next thing you know I need a bigger apartment."
Those bulging files and that overstuffed apartment have paid off: At
28, with a few months before he graduates from Yale Law School, Keefe is making a splash with "Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping," a book that tries to fill in the shadowy portrait of electronic intelligence gathering by the United States and its allies.On a recent weekday, as he sits on a couch in his childhood home in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, it is the growing culture of domestic secrecy and surveillance that seems to worry Keefe most. While he acknowledges there is a legitimate need for intelligence gathering in the post-9/11 world, he hopes his book will generate a public discussion about the trade-offs between security and privacy that, he says, are being made by government authorities without consulting the American people.