Paglen's research into areas that officially don't exist leads him on a globe-trotting adventure into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled "black empire, which he chronicles in this adventurous and often chilling road trip through the underworld of the U.S. military.

Paglen's research into areas that officially don't exist leads him on a globe-trotting adventure into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled "black empire, which he chronicles in this adventurous and often chilling road trip through the underworld of the U.S. military.

Welcome to a top-level clearance world that doesn't exist ...Now with updated material for the paperback edition.

This is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a road trip through a shadow nation of state secrets, clandestine military bases, black sites, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies that make up what insiders call the black world. Here, geographer and provocateur Trevor Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out a covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar black budget, and interviews those who live on the edges of these blank spots. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, a secret prison in Kabul, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless-and delivers eye-opening details.