IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 26

Book Review
Book Review
Scientists Under Surveillance: The FBI
Files-edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D.
Lipton, and Michael Morisy (Cambridge,
MA, USA: The MIT Press, 2019, 413 +
xix pp.)
Reviewed by James R. Russell
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
 The volume under review is a selection of
declassified FBI documents, reproduced in facsimile,
from the Cold War era files of 16 people (15 men
and one woman) described as scientists. The editors
do not explain their criteria for the choice of subjects.
One, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was a Russian soldier
who invented a durable automatic assault rifle,
the popular AK-47. It is a stretch to call that science.
Moreover, Kalashnikov never set foot in the United
States. (A recently erected monument to him in Moscow
had to be fixed since it showed him toting a German
submachine gun. At least there was no mob,
yanking it off its pedestal amidst howls denouncing
Mikhail Timofeyevich's " white privilege " or " toxic
masculinity. " ) Isaac Asimov had a degree in science
(he and my mother were classmates at Brooklyn
College) and was a professor of biochemistry but
is famous as a popular writer of science fiction and
books on science for the layman. Alfred Kinsey was
an enthusiastic, hands-on researcher of male sexuality:
more a sociologist than a hard scientist, perhaps.
Timothy Leary did scientific research but is better
known as an apostle of the counterculture whose
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3147523
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
26
invitation to take LSD, " turn on, tune in, and drop
out " some of you may remember. Though they say
that if you remember the 1960s you were not there.
The book, the editors note, is a companion volume
to a similar assemblage of FBI files on famous writers
that they published with the same MIT series.
The foreword, which is two-and-a-half-page
length, focuses on a false allegation by the FBI of
espionage against a Chinese-born scientist, in 2015,
as an example of the dangers of official paranoia.
While any injustice is to be deplored, the choice
seems poor, given China's proven record of strategic
and industrial espionage and massive intellectual
theft. The Introduction features a quotation
about liberty from Patrick Henry and other sentiments
about intellectual freedom with which most
scientists or scholars would probably agree. But
there is no comprehensive discussion or analysis of
the material presented, nor is there an index. Each
section begins with a helpful one-page biographical
cameo on the scientist under investigation.
The principal problem of the book is that readers
must pick their way through indistinct images of
the heavily cut typescript and scrawled handwriting
of original documents, and a great many of the
documents reproduced are so faint as to be entirely
illegible. Some pages are the empty reverse of a
written obverse. Others are entirely blacked out:
presumably this is the editors' way of expressing
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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