April 2008

The New Yorker piece I've been working on for a while, about an Islamic charity, Al Haramain, that is suing the Bush administration over warrantless wiretapping, is on stands this week, and here.

In February and March I was in China's Fujian province, doing research for the book. It was an amazing trip: fruitful, research-wise, and pleasant in all sorts of ways I wouldn't have expected, due mainly to the incredibly warm welcome of various friends-of-friends who I ended up spending time with. I was based in Fuzhou and Changle, the two largest cities in the area, but made research trips out to Tingjiang, Lianjiang, Mawei and Fuqing, to Sister Ping's village and to Ah Kay's, and to the home of Zheng Kai Qu, a Golden Venture passenger who came to America and chose not to stay, taking the deportation option rather than remain in prison. He returned to China, where he now lives and works in Changle. Having spent time interviewing people who were on the ship and stayed in the United States, it was fascinating to hear the other side of the story.

Good English-language information on Fuzhou and its environs is difficult to come by, but just before leaving I discovered this fantastic blog, which I'd recommend to anyone who wants to visit that corner of China, or learn more about it. Its author is Ben Ross, a Kansas City native who moved to China after college and chose not to live in Beijing or Shanghai, but in Fuqing and Fuzhou, where he worked as a barber and became an accidental game show star.

I wrote a three-part series about the trip for Slate, here.

One of the most fascinating people I met in Fuzhou was Dr. Tang, who I talk about briefly in the first Slate piece. Dr. Tang is an old friend and mentor of one of my closest friends in Chinatown, and he ended up traveling around with me for most of my stay, and sharing his wisdom about Fujian and the U.S., the history of Chinese migration, eastern and western medicine, southern Chinese cuisine, and a host of other things. He's a traditional Chinese doctor who lived in New York for several years in the 1990s and ran a clinic that catered to undocumented Fujianese. He specializes in infertility and prescribes herbal remedies to couples who can't conceive; many families credit him with enabling them to have children. He's also a highly regarded calligrapher; if you go to restaurants and businesses in the Fujianese part of Chinatown (including Sister Ping's restaurant, at 47 East Broadway), you'll see his work prominently displayed. He's got a contemplative, scholarly way about him, but he seemed to know someone everywhere we went, and the trip wouldn't have been nearly as successful, or as fun, without him. When we'd been hanging out for a few days, he presented me with a beautiful scroll that he had painted with two bold, swooping characters. I won't reproduce the Chinese here, but the first character translates as "in accordance with," and the second as "your will." May things go in accordance with your will.

Anyway, a big shoutout to Dr. Tang.

December 2007

I’ve fallen a little behind on the site lately—apologies to those of you keeping track. The snakehead book is due this summer, and I’ve been turning out chapters at a frantic rate in order to bring it in on deadline. Last month I gave the first hundred pages to my editor, Bill Thomas, at Doubleday, and he seems confident it’s on the right track. More daunting was the realization that this hundred pages amounts to only about a quarter of the finished book. So busy months ahead. (Including a trip to Fuzhou just after the Chinese New Year, about which more soon.)

The other big project lately has been a piece for the New Yorker about terrorist financing, which took me to San Francisco and Oregon, back and forth between New York and Washington, and almost to Saudi Arabia, though in the final analysis the Kingdom proved unwilling to come through with a visa. That piece is due soon, and, barring any surprises, should hopefully be out in February.

This is a while ago now, but I organized a panel discussion at Century last month on accountability for private military contractors, with the industry’s ubiquitous representative Doug Brooks, Washington Post Iraq correspondent (and current Yale law student) Jon Finer, Special Forces Captain Tommy Sowers, and Jose Luis Gomez del Prado, who heads the United Nations’ Working Group on Mercenaries. It was a good group, and many of the audience members were people who have been working on these issues, which definitely enlivened the discussion. It’s on YouTube (in pieces), and here.

If you’re at or near the University of Virginia, I’ll be giving a talk on the Sister Ping story, sort of a trial run for some of the themes and anecdotes in the book, at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, on January 28. I think it’ll be carried on the local NPR affiliate as well, more details on that when I’ve got them. Meantime, the event info is here.

“The Jefferson Bottles” was optioned by Ben Karlin, who was the editor of The Onion and then, until recently, the Executive Producer of the Daily Show. (And co-creator, with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, of The Colbert Report; he literally suffers from a surplus of bona fides.) He recently set up his own production company, Super Ego Industries. They have a big production deal with HBO, and the Koch v. Rodenstock story is their first project. Here’s the Variety write-up, replete with bad puns and little inaccuracies (Koch didn’t buy the bottles from Christie’s).

Nor, it should almost go without saying, has Koch been sitting on his hands since the piece came out. One of the really fascinating things I didn’t end up putting in the piece was that Koch has been tracing the provenance of some of the fraudulent bottles in his collection, and he believes that in some cases the bottles he purchased at auction had been knowingly consigned by other rich collectors who didn’t want to get stuck with a cellar full of fake wine. Well, Koch just sued one of them.

Finally—and I promise I’ll put the wine thing to rest—I got the most excellent holiday gift from Super Ego the other day.

So should I open it, or what?

September 2007

Last minute, but the immigration talk at Columbia on Sept. 18 will be from 6-8 at Faculty House, 116th Street and Morningside Drive.

August 2007

There’s a new piece running in the New Yorker that hits stands Monday August 27. It’s a fun story about counterfeit wine. Check it out.

A few events:

If you’re in New York, I’ll be giving a talk on human smuggling and immigration policy at Columbia on Tues. Sept. 18. More details to come.

The weekend of September 29-30 I’ll be attending the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence (CASIS) conference in Calgary, speaking on a panel that deals with wiretapping and electronic intelligence and is chaired by Charles Gonthier, the commissioner of CSE, Canada’s eavesdropping agency. I’ve always found the Canadian intelligence establishment to be much more open than our own; a couple of years ago I did another CASIS panel which was chaired by the then-head of CSE, and the discussion was more frank and far-reaching than anything you’d ever expect from a sitting official on this side of the border. At any rate, it promises to be interesting.

Tuesday, October 2, I’ll be giving a talk at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton on the privatization of intelligence, expanding on the Op-Ed I wrote on the subject in June.

May 2007

"The Idol Thief" finally ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks back. It's here.

April 2007

It's been a busy couple of months. I just got back from several weeks in Hong Kong and Thailand, where I was doing some research for the human smuggling book. The foreign policy team at TCF is gearing up for a conference this weekend at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on the impact of rising powers like India and China on the global order.

The New Yorker piece on antiquities smuggling is done, though it may be some time before they run it. I'll link to it when they do. I may start another piece for the magazine in the interim, but for the foreseeable future the main writing project is the snakehead book.

I've got chapters in two new books that are coming out. One is a short distillation of some of the issues in Chatter for this incredible collection, which is edited by the University of Georgia's Loch Johnson, and contains dozens of essays by a dazzling assortment of intelligence experts. If you happen to have $450 burning a hole in your pocket, by all means pick up a copy. The other chapter is in this book, which will be published by PublicAffairs in association with TCF, next month. It has chapters by Gary Hart, Aziz Huq, David Cole, Stacy Sullivan, Alan Brinkley and others—a steal at $15.95. My chapter addresses the privatization of intelligence gathering and analysis, and some of the troubling implications of this development.

My buddy Noah Shachtman recently pulled up stakes at Defensetech and started a new blog, Danger Room, over at Wired, covering the same defense and intelligence technology issues. He's brought along some of his regular contributors from before, and enlisted the terrific Sharon Weinberger, author of the by turns funny and scary look at fringe defense science, Imaginary Weapons.

While I'm book plugging, Joe Cirincione, a colleague at the Center for American Progress with whom I've collaborated on a number of events, who is an authority on nonproliferation as well as a terrific guy, just came out with a great new book, Bomb Scare. It's provocative, accessible, and short; no doorstop potential here. And it merited an uncharacteristically Larry King-ish turn from Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books ($): "it ought to be read by everyone as a matter of life or death." How ya like them apples?

January 2007

Event: The NYCLU event on government spying is this coming Tuesday, January 16, at 7PM. It's a good lineup, and admission is free. More info here.

November 2006

It was brought to my attention a few weeks back that I’ve been a little remiss in keeping this section of the site up-to-date. The problem is, with a handful of big projects ongoing, it hasn’t exactly been thrill-a-minute around here lately (genuinely thrilling wedding & honeymoon notwithstanding). So more regular posts in this section may necessitate a slightly lower threshold on what qualifies as news.

That said: I’ve been working primarily on a long review of Moisés Naím’s book Illicit for the New York Review of Books, which pulls together some of the research I’ve been doing on cross-border criminal networks and the globalization of crime. There’s also the India piece for the New Yorker, which also, perhaps not unpredictably, deals with smuggling. Then there’s the Golden Venture/Sister Ping book, which grew out of this article, and will probably bring me to China for a research trip in the new year. Between those projects and day-to-day stuff at TCF, where the Iran strategy program progresses at a good clip, it’s been busy.

Two speaking engagements:

If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be speaking at a panel on “Secrecy in an Age of Terror,” at Harvard, on Monday December 11. The event is organized by the Humanities Center, and will be held in the Barker Center, from 4-6PM.  The other speakers are Peter Galison and Juliette Kayyem; the moderator is Homi Bhabha.

If you’re in New York, I’ll also be speaking at a Town Hall Meeting organized by the New York Civil Liberties Union, at NYU Law School, on January 17. The topic is the NSA and domestic surveillance. I don’t have all the details yet, but when I know the time, venue and other speakers I’ll post them.

Director Nick Broomfield has made a film about the Morecambe Bay tragedy, a harrowing story about Fujianese migrants that resonates, in a series of ways, with the Golden Venture story.  It hasn’t had a theatrical release yet, but is playing festivals. It’s called "Ghosts". Keep an eye out.

Finally, and I realize we’re straying into blog territory here: my faith in the possibility of internet innovations that are genuinely innovative was restored recently by this episode of Frontline, about internet-based microcredit. It may be that the small size of the San Francisco startup Kiva is precisely what allows it to maintain intimacy and quality control, thereby skirting the shortcomings that generally bedevil long distance altruism. If so, it will be interesting to see how the operation copes with growth. But for now, think about making a loan; if the model works, and the default rate stays low, your one-time gift can be recycled again and again. And if the borrower defaults, it’s a sunk cost; you don’t have to give anything more, and off you go, cynicism intact. Brilliant.

September 2006

The foreign policy team at the Century Foundation has inaugurated a big project on Iran with a white paper by retired Air Force colonel and war gamer extraordinaire Sam Gardiner, here . The thrust of Gardiner's argument is that the White House is moving very rapidly toward initiating air strikes on Iran and that the bomb-from-above strategy is unlikely to knock out the country's nuclear program, but that the administration is going to proceed anyway, because the real agenda isn't the destruction of the regime's nuclear program--it's the destruction of the regime. An ill-considered war commenced under false pretenses…Rings a bell somehow. Future papers in the series from Barry Posen, Bruce Jentleson, and Flynt Leverett.

I spent a good part of August in India, researching a new piece for the New Yorker. More on that soon.

I'm also working on a chapter for the sequel to this book on national security and civil liberties. The working title of the chapter is "The Espionage Industrial Complex," and it addresses the huge boom in the homeland security and defense & intelligence technology industries over the last five years. I want to look into the way a lot of new invasive technologies—some of them useful, some utterly useless—are driven not so much by Orwellian public sector spooks as by their snake oil salesmen counterparts in the private sector. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, anecdotes, leads on the subject, please send them my way: patrick@patrickraddenkeefe.com.

Finally, but most significantly, I'm getting married next month, to Justyna Gudzowska, just outside Perugia, Italy.

July 2006

July 11 Random House will publish the paperback edition of CHATTER, with a terrific cover redesign, care of Sai, and an up-to-date new afterword on the last six months of revelations about the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. Buy it at Amazon or B&N.

May 2006

I just returned from a terrific week in Switzerland, at the Young Leaders Conference. Lots of interesting participants from the U.S. and Switzerland, and ample, occasionally heated, debate. The American contingent ran the gamut politically, and more often than not we took to one another's throats, while the Swiss, perhaps not uncharacteristically, sat back and watched. As it happens, the Swiss are pretty terrified about the increasingly unilateralist direction of U.S. foreign policy; I wish I could have been more reassuring.

The big story in USA Today earlier this month about the NSA brought with it a certain I-told-you-so satisfaction. It's a little strange to see my hunch about network theory play out the way it did, and I've always disliked journalistic territoriality—that tendency to want credit for being there first. But the recognition, such as it is, is gratifying. The upshot was a flurry of talking head sessions, which can be tedious. But on one in particular, Chris Lydon's Open Source show on Public Radio International, I got to talk with Ryan Singel, Glenn Greenwald…and William Gibson! What a lineup. Listen to it here.

The "Listening In" panel at the NYPL earlier this month was a lot of fun. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the first NSA director in the FISA era, made news with his critique of the warrantless surveillance program, James Risen expressed real optimism that congress will eventually bring the agency and the administration into line on this issue, and Jeff Rosen deftly teased out the areas on which the panelists disagreed. Transcript here, or you can watch it here.

The Italian edition of Chatter is out this month. Intercettare Il Mondo ("Intercepting the World").

Finally, I just signed on to expand the Chinese human smuggling story into a book, for Doubleday.

April 2006

Lots of news this month. First, I just found out I’ve been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue investigating cross-border criminal networks. This is very exciting, as it will facilitate some far flung research I might not otherwise have managed. A neat symmetry: another recipient is Helen DeWitt, who I got to know when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and who wrote one of my favorite novels, The Last Samurai.  (No relation to the Tom Cruise movie; more’s the pity for Tom.)

CBS has optioned CHATTER, in the hopes of developing some of the storylines into a T.V. drama, set in the world of eavesdroppers and eavesdropping. 

The Spanish edition of the book is out at the end of this month. Title: Escuchas.

If you’re in the New York area, please come to what should be a fantastic symposium on May 8 at the New York Public Library. Titled “Listening In: Eavesdropping and the National Security Agency,” the panel will be James Risen, the New York Times reporter who first broke the warrantless wiretapping story, and wrote the bestseller State of War, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the NSA, Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington, legal affairs editor at the New Republic, and the author of several excellent books, and myself. Info on the event is here.

The New Yorker piece on human smuggling that I’ve been working on for months should be running Monday April 17.  I’ll post it in the Articles section then.

During my research I met a New York filmmaker, Peter Cohn, who has spent years working on a documentary about the passengers who arrived in America on the smuggling ship the Golden Venture, in the summer of 1993. The movie is now finished, with narration by Tim Robbins.  It’s called “Golden Venture,” and is having its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.  The passengers who arrived here on the ship endured several harrowing months at sea only to be thrown into prison when they arrived here, and many of them remained in prison for four years. Those who are still here are trying to normalize their immigration status, and thirty of them are coming to New York for a press conference in conjunction with the screening.  Showtimes, tickets, etc. here.

March 2006

The big news is the launch of this site, which will serve as an article archive, a source of news and updates about current and future projects, and, possibly, a half-assed late entry to the blogging craze.  More or less everything you’ll see here—the site design, the photo of me, the excellent new cover for the paperback of CHATTER—is the work of extravagantly talented artist, old friend, and neighbor, Sai Sriskandarajah, whose portfolio and site are here.

Other recent news:

I started a new position at the Century Foundation in February. TCF is a progressive policy think tank, housed in a drafty old townhouse on the Upper East Side. So far it has been excellent—a diverse and fascinating group of colleagues, doing really interesting work. The whole experience—the building, the atmosphere, the think-tanky work—brings to mind the incredible opening act of that old Redford movie “Three Days of the Condor.” I’m afraid to go out for sandwiches.

Since the NSA warrantless eavesdropping story broke in December I’ve been busy cranking out pieces on various aspects of the evolving scandal. Most are in the Articles section.

My major project for the last six months has been a long piece for The New Yorker on Chinese human smuggling, the wreck of a smuggling ship, the Golden Venture, back in 1993, and the trial last summer of one of the figures behind that voyage, Cheng Chui Ping, aka “Sister Ping.”  Cheng’s being sentenced some time in the next month or so; with luck the piece should run later in the spring.

Almost done with the new afterword for the paperback of CHATTER. The paperback should be out in July.  The Dutch and Japanese translations are already out; I’ll try to post images of the covers soon.