The Naked Society. Vance Packard
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35. John Brooks, “There’s Somebody Watching You: The Naked Society, by Vance Packard,” New York Times Books Review, March 15, 1964, p. 1.
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. . .”—Judge Learned Hand
1. The Individual at Bay An Introduction
“Society is continually pushing in on the individual. He has only a few areas in which he can be himself, free from external restraint or observation.”—U.S. Senator Edward V. Long of Missouri
By telescoping time a bit let us look in on a reasonably successful family in a typical city of the Land of Liberty, 1964.
Mom is at the department store trying on a new dress in the dressing room. A closed-circuit TV camera hidden behind a mesh screen is recording her moves to make certain she does not pocket any of the store’s merchandise.
Dad is at a conference table in his office talking to a group of colleagues about the operations of his department. The colleague sitting next to him is an undercover agent hired from a nationwide detective agency by the president of Dad’s company to keep tabs on the performance of key subordinates. Elsewhere an investigator is on the telephone chatting with Dad’s banker about the size of Dad’s account and any outstanding loans. It seems that Dad recently applied for an insurance policy on his personal property.
Son John, just out of college, is seated in a chair with a pneumatic tube strapped across his chest and an electrode taped to his palm. John has applied for a job as a sales representative for an electronics concern. He is now undergoing the usual lie-detector test to probe his honesty, his possibly dangerous habits, and his manliness. Meanwhile an investigator is talking to one of John’s erstwhile professors concerning any political opinions the boy may have expressed during class discussions.
Daughter Mary, sweet girl, is still only a sophomore in high school. She is in the classroom struggling with a 250-item questionnaire. It asks her to reveal whether her parents seem to quarrel a lot, whether they have ever talked to her about sex, and whether she is worried about menstrual disorders. If Mary’s parents happen to hear about this probing, they would be denied any information as to her various responses and how they were scored.
All these things obviously would not happen on the same day to one family but all of them happen every day to a great many individuals. All have become common enough occurrences to raise somber questions about what the future holds for late twentieth-century society.
Are there loose in our modern world forces that threaten to annihilate everybody’s privacy? And if such forces are indeed loose, are they establishing the preconditions of totalitarianism that could endanger the personal freedom of modern man?
These are the questions we must ponder as we explore the recent enormous growth in methods for observing, examining, controlling, and exchanging information about people. Individually the new social controls we are seeing are cloaked in reasonableness. And some perhaps have comic overtones. But when we view them collectively we must consider the possibility that they represent a massive, insidious impingement upon our traditional rights as free citizens to live our own lives.
Many of these new forces are producing pressures that intrude upon most of us where we live, work, shop, go to school, or seek solitude. Millions of Americans are living in an atmosphere in which peering electronic eyes, undercover agents, lie detectors, hidden tape recorders, bureaucratic investigators, and outrageously intrusive questionnaires are becoming commonplace, if often only suspected, facts of life.
Privacy is becoming harder and harder to attain, surveillance more and more pervasive. Mr. Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court has commented: “The forces allied against the individual have never been greater.”
The surveillance of citizens in the United States—and much of western Europe—has been growing year by year. One indication of its extent in the United States is seen in an analysis of our security system made a few years ago. It indicated that, even then, more than 13,500,000 Americans—or approximately one fifth of all jobholders—were being scrutinized under some sort of security or loyalty program.1 In 1962 the Department of Defense alone conducted security investigations on 826,000 individuals.2
Surveillance of individuals for security, loyalty, or general behavior is most rampant in Southern California. In this area the majority of the families have one or more members under some form of watch, either as defense workers, public employees, studio employees, or as recipients of welfare benefits. For most of these people, at least one investigator is bound to call on next-door neighbors to inquire about their backgrounds or living habits.
The United States Government employs more than 25,000 professional investigators, not including counterintelligence and espionage operatives. Federal investigators, however, represent only a small fraction of the total number of people in the nation who earn their living investigating other people. There are hundreds of thousands of private, corporate, municipal, county, and state investigators.
Consider one private investigative firm that is little known to most Americans. Its world headquarters are in Atlanta. This firm bears the now outdated name of the Retail Credit Company. It offers a continent-spanning intelligence service with 6000 full-time salaried “inspectors” on “constant call,” who operate out of 1500 offices in every state and Canadian province. It has sixty-four offices in Ohio alone and has representatives in Mexico and Europe. The company’s inspectors conduct about 90,000 investigations every working day, reporting mostly on individuals. They investigate applicants for insurance and claimants of insurance, they also check people’s credit, and they conduct investigations of job applicants for clients. Their firm has 38,000 client accounts that include many of the world’s largest companies.
Much of the surveillance of individuals by trained investigators has been made easier by the proliferation of record-keeping in our increasingly bureaucratic society. I found it startling to learn how much information about one’s private life is readily available to any skilled investigator who knows where to check accessible records and make a few routine inquiries. Detectives told me some of the presumably private information about myself—or just about any adult who is not a hermit—that an investigator could readily produce in most areas of the United States. They were referring just to an “easy” kind of checkout. An investigator in the New York State area could produce for a curious client most of the facts about you or me listed below, and it could be done within a few days. Here are the facts:
—Whether there are any significant blemishes on your record where you have worked.
—How much money you have in your checking account at the bank (roughly), whether you borrow money often and for what, whether you have been delinquent in paying back loans, and whether you have any outstanding loans.
—Whether you are a poor credit risk.
—Whether you have ever suffered from mental illness for which you were confined, been treated for a heart ailment, or been a victim of convulsive disorders. (This information can often be found in a public document—one’s original application for a driver’s license.)
—Whether you are a known sexual deviate.
—Whether you actually received that college degree, if you claim one.
—Whether you have ever been arrested, or had any lawsuits filed against you.
—A good surmise as to whether you were legitimately born, when and where, and the occupation of your parents at the time.
—Your net worth (provided you have a sizable unsecured bank loan), the value of your home, its layout and construction,