The first book on this subject may have been The American Deep State – Wall St, Big Oil and the attack on American Democracy by Peter Dale Scott which appeared in 2015 - but I have just plotted an ngram on the subject which records that its use became exponential only in the new millennium. And that it was in use between 1880 and 1890 – presumably at the time of US populism.
The term has spread like wildfire throughout the world since it does seem
to represent a new phenomenon – namely the way judicial and security systems
have combined to create new targets who, coincidentally, tend to be those challenging the status-quo. The concept is much-loved by those of a conspiratorial
bent and is frequently used in ex-communist countries such as Romania whose
infamous Securitate still very much alive – one the best articles on this aspect of the country is Romania Redivivus
The tentacles of the Deep Security State. Meanwhile, beneath the surface of democratization, the authoritarian tenor of Ceauşescu’s rule persists in Romania’s powerful security forces. The Securitate, the most ruthless police force in the Warsaw Pact, has been rebranded and is now run by a generation of operatives whose average age is 35, trained at special intelligence universities. They are, in many cases, the children of the 16,000 Securitate members who provided the backbone of the Romanian state after 1989, having emerged as the undisputed winners of the ‘revolution’ of that year. At least nine of these new services exist. The predominant one, the Serviciul Român de Informaţii (SRI), monitors Romanians internally; with some 12,000 operatives, it has double the manpower of any equivalent agency in Europe and, with military-grade espionage equipment, conducts upwards of 40,000 wiretaps a year.10 The older generation of Securitate agents managed the privatization schemes of the 1990s; they are now shielded by the younger cohort from legal oversight.
This interlocking of economic influence—four out of the five richest Romanians have a Securitate background—and legal inviolability—Romania’s judiciary is too dependent on the SRI to prosecute it—allows the deep state to operate with impunity. The security services have vast stakes in telecommunications and big-data collection. They oversee their own ngos, run their own tv channels and have their people on the editorial boards of the major Romanian newspapers and across the government ministries. The permeation of the state by these networks comes to light only occasionally. In October 2015, a nightclub fire in Bucharest killed sixty-four, more than half the deaths due to infections contracted later at a local hospital. Why? The hospital’s disinfectants, concocted by a company called Hexi Pharma to which the government had granted a monopoly"
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