At 3am one night in the quiet Chicago suburb of Bridgeview, Illinois, 16-year-old Assia Boundaoui was awakened by two men working on the telephone line outside her bedroom window. She woke her mother, who replied, “It’s no big deal, it’s probably just the FBI.” So ingrained was the feeling of being watched, the now-journalist and filmmaker had shrugged off childhood warnings about strange cars parked in the neighbourhood and even her mother checking for bugs under the kitchen table, until now. Speaking to residents, filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act and even taking the FBI to court, Boundaoui uncovers “Operation Vulgar Betrayal,” the largest pre-9/11 counter-terrorism surveillance undertaking in history. Among the thousands of pages of unsealed documents, emotional recollections of her friends and neighbours and unsettling archival footage, Boundaoui shines light not only on the disturbing trajectory of American racial profiling and xenophobia, but the life-altering effects of the death of privacy. Myrocia Watamaniuk