The Naked Society. Vance Packard
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damned far enough, if you ask me.” This was a business newsletter. “Don’t Get Carried Away,” the last section warned (“If the policy is too harsh, people will leave”), concluding with one last piece of advice: “Savvy employees are always looking for ways to beat the system . . . If you have electronic communications policies in place, make sure they are updated to include new technologies as they come out, such as instant messaging and camera phones.”22
I also found an article on the blog of a store that sold security equipment asking if it was ethical to spy on employees. It concluded that, yes, mostly, it was, adding, “Let’s be clear here. We intend for this question to be applied only to employers spying on employees. We feel it necessary to make this distinction, since there have been recent allegations of employees spying on one another, which is definitely viewed by most as being unethical.”23
Packard (who died in 1996) would have loved that—having written of the tone corporate America was setting for the rest of society as one of “moral squalor.” He raised alarms that “it was now possible for a technician to drive a special truck up a street and then report what channel each TV user on the street was dialing.” I wonder what he would have made of Facebook? In the spring of 2013, a concerned public relations consultant named Peter Shankman posted there, “To the 43 of my friends who currently use the hookup app ‘Bang With Friends,’ including the 15 of you who are married, you should know that it’s FAR from as private as you think.”24 Shankman set up a simple link for interested parties to work such magic themselves. I clicked it myself—and learned that among the five of my friends who had downloaded the app were an extremely prominent, extremely married political pundit.
Packard also all but lost his mind over cameras being used, for example, so apartment dwellers could inspect who was buzzing their residents, to police department store theft, to keep tabs on workplace productivity. What would he have said of the marketing email I received from the PMBC Group in the wake of the Boston Marathon terror bombing?
Hi Rick,
Ever since the travesty of 9/11, the video surveillance industry has spiked unconditionally, becoming a $3.2 billion market in the US by the end of 2007. Since then an estimated 1.1 million more security cameras have been distributed globally through retailers in 2010 alone. After video surveillance helped to identify the Boston Marathon culprits, we can all anticipate another drastic increase in sales and installations nationwide.
Video surveillance has actively developed, with the increasing demand, usage and advancements in technology. The Internet now allows police to review footage as ivideon archives all data in data centers located around the world. All the while, ivideon is streaming multiple cameras from different continents to one single easy to view interface.
As private video surveillance systems have become an integral aspect to criminal investigations, there has been an increased rate of installation. Personal cameras such as webcams, IP cameras, IP cameras with built-in ivideon, CCTVs, and DVRs can all stream live feeds both to the police as well as personal devices. Sharing these feeds can be done through ivideon’s public TV, websites, blogs, social media platforms, as well as shared access.
Please let me know if you are interested in speaking with Vladimir Eremeev of ivideon to learn more about the growing video surveillance industry and how ivideon is paving the way for the everyday user.25
From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Back then, Packard reports, thirteen million Americans, one-fifth of all job holders, were scrutinized by a “loyalty” or “security” program (826,000 were conducted by the Department of Defense alone), and the House Committee on Un-American Activities maintained a card file of over a million names. “In all major cities the government maintains hotel rooms with eavesdropping equipment already installed through a nearby wall. When a person under surveillance goes to a hotel, ‘the proper authorities arrange for him to be put in the proper room.’” (One such person was Martin Luther King, which was how J. Edgar Hoover amassed the transcripts sent anonymously to him in 1964 in an attempt to get him to commit suicide.26) How revealing, this sentence, in a section called “The Movement Toward a Garrison State Mentality”: “Although not the least bit mitliaristic as a people, Americans are being swept toward being a martial—and thus watched-society.”
Now just to take a single example, we have the abomination of the “No-Fly” list, more and more a vehicle of what the Canadian writer Murtaza Hussain has described as “de facto exile”; among the stories Hussain has recently catalogued in an article for al Jazeera is the Ph.D. student en route to a Stanford-sponsored engineering conference stuck in a “Kafkaesque legal limbo” in Malaysia for eight years; the multimillionaire businessman with close ties to Bill Clinton, Gilbert Chagoury, effectively banned from travel for no reason he has ever been able to determine (“I cannot accept being labelled a terrorist when I am known all over the world as a person who loves peace. It hurts.”); one man told by FBI agents that he would be removed from the list if he agreed to spy on other Muslims; another placed on the list immediately after refusing to spy on fellow South Asians. “In the past year,” Hussain says, “the number of individuals placed by the Obama administration on the federal No-Fly list has doubled to over 10,000, with at least 500 being holders of American citizenship. A further 400,000 individuals of indeterminate citizenship are on a separate ‘watch list’ which flags them as being ‘reasonably suspicious and potentially subject to exclusion. The names of those on these lists are not being disclosed and neither is the reasoning as to why any particular individual may be flagged.”27
Such outrages, of course, have become far to numerous to possibly catalogue in this space. Luckily we can turn to two recent books by David K. Shipler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter, The Rights of the People (2012) and Rights at Risk (2012), for a passionate, eloquent accounting.28 Shipler’s work is the closest we have now to what Packard was doing then. There is, however, a difference. Packard’s book spent almost six months on the bestseller list. I wrote David Shipler to ask about his own sales. He replied, “My boookswere not on any bestseller list that didn’t extend into the four digits—far from it.” Rights at Risk sold so poorly that it was never released in paperback.29 Publishers Weekly thought Shipler was overwrought concerning “less intrusive” electronic surveillance, which, after all, was nothing like “Hessians kicking down doors.” And those contrasts, finally, brings us to the final reason The Naked Society is so usefully illuminating about our own time.
V.
The release of The Naked Society was a publishing event: full-page ads everywhere (“VANCE PACKARD ROCKS THE NATION WITH HIS MOST EXPLOSIVE BOOK YET!”); fawning, long reviews in papers like the Wall Street Journal (“We are farther down a dangerous road than it is pleasant to think about...”) and the Washington Post (“The number or people who ‘have a little list’ on which you may find yourself is astonishing”); attention by top columnists booming its themes in magazines and on the editorial pages (Stewart Alsop launched a major exposé on polygraphs, for example, in the Saturday Evening Post).31 Many reviewed it alongside another, similar book The Privacy Invaders by a former private investigator. The essays also frequently referred to the fact that 1964 was but twenty years before George Orwell’s 1984.
What comes across most forcefully from both the book and those reviews is how many revelations were judged outrageous by Americans that are almost entirely taken for granted today. Packard was horrified by a Manhattan district attorney who opined on network television “in favor of an astonishing bill being submitted to the New York State legislature. It gives a policeman who is armed with a search warrant the right to enter a premises, including a home, without saying who he is or what he is doing there.” That is to say, he was horrified at just the thought of a prosecutor suggesting such a law. Imagine his shock if he could learn that, according to Profesor Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, the number of such real-world “no-knock” arrest warrants incrased from 3,000 in 1981 to 50,000 in 2005. I asked Professor Kraska if he could help me find more recent statistics. “No,” he answered, “unfortunately no one keeps track of this.”32 According to the Cato Institute, forty people have been