The Naked Society. Vance Packard
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—Whether you have been involved in an automobile accident in recent years.
—Whether your loyalty has ever been questioned by any of the better-known investigative bodies, public or private.
—Whether you are a registered Democrat, Republican, or have failed to register a party preference.
When I expressed curiosity about my own credit rating one detective said, “Give me a couple of hours.” Within that period he called and gave me data from a credit report on me. It contained a fairly thorough summary of my life, employers, agents, abodes, and offspring for the past two decades, and the precise assessed value of my home in Connecticut. He chuckled and added: “They say that, though you pay your bills, you occasionally take your time about it.” He added that such reports often will provide a guess as to the person’s annual income but that apparently my income was too erratic for a guess to be made.
Most American adults with jobs, cars, houses, charge accounts, insurance, and military or government records can assume that at least one specific dossier on them—more probably several—has been compiled. Most contain facts that are, by and large, relatively impersonal. But a great many hundreds of thousands of these dossiers contain thick reports with intimate details. Many also contain erroneous or adverse information.
The U.S. Civil Service Commission, which maintains a dossier on nearly everyone who has applied for federal employment since 1939, reportedly has nearly 250,000 dossiers that contain adverse information.
Its central index of approximately 7,500,000 dossiers is just one of the many central files on individuals that have grown to enormous proportions in recent years. The Defense Department maintains a central index of members of the armed forces, civilian employees, and a great many other people, including scientists working for defense contractors. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, of course, has its extensive central file. The House Un-American Activities Committee reportedly has accumulated a card file of more than a million names. The Association of Casualty and Surety Companies maintains a vast nationwide clearinghouse of information regarding claimants. Very recently its file contained 18,200,000 entries on claimants for bodily injury or workmen’s compensation. The bureau investigates or scrutinizes about one fourth of all claims, which means it conducts about 500,000 investigations a year. And then, of course, there are the credit bureaus in every part of the United States as well as in Canada, England, and Australia that are affiliated with the Associated Credit Bureaus of America. Through rapid exchange arrangements any bureau can draw upon files kept on more than 100,000,000 individuals.
The private investigative firm Retail Credit Company has files on more than 42,000,000 individuals. These files consist of previous reports the firm has made on individuals, significant newspaper clippings, and available public records about individuals. The company points out to prospective clients that its massive files can strengthen and support any current investigations it makes.
A further indication of the increase in surveillance since the beginning of World War II is the tremendous amount of electronic eavesdropping that now occurs. An electronics expert familiar with the practices of U.S. intelligence agencies told me: “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 such a hotel, “the proper authorities arrange for him to be put in the proper room,” he said.
The United States of course is not the only country in which eavesdropping has been growing. The Russians have a very large head start. An American with Communist sympathies who had lived inside Russia a few years and then returned to America cited to acquaintances as one of his grievances about the Russian system that electronic listening devices were everywhere.
Of the many forms of electronic surveillance, wiretapping has had the most public attention in the U.S., not because it is the most pernicious and rampant, but simply because it has generated the most political heat. Unlike the hiding of microphones and cameras, which is more invasive of privacy, wiretapping is a federal crime, although the Justice Department for its own good reasons takes a tortured view of the law and an interestingly lax approach to enforcing even its own view.
The Justice Department and law-enforcement officials in a few states are pressing hard for clear-cut permission to wiretap in investigating certain suspected criminal activities. At one Senate hearing the Attorney General explained: “We are balancing off the right of privacy versus the need for better law enforcement. . . Many Americans, particularly those apprehensive about crime, would insist the “balance” tips far more heavily toward law enforcement.
During one session attended by the Attorney General, Senator John A. Carroll of Colorado raised a crucial point. He wondered if there was perhaps so much preoccupation with “racketeers, gamblers or prostitutes” that something far more fundamental to society was not being neglected: “the right of every citizen to his privacy.”
As this book is being completed, late January, 1964, the Federal Communications Commission, after many years of virtually ignoring the mounting problem of electronic eavesdropping, has invited comment on proposed rules seeking to curb one kind of electronic surveillance. That would be the kind requiring the use of radio transmitters, whether for bugging or wiretapping. Even if we assume the rules are issued, their enforcement probably will be delayed pending court challenges brought by manufacturers. This action is long overdue. However, it seems doubtful that these proposed rules would significantly diminish eavesdropping because of the broad exceptions written into them. For example they make an exception for actions by law-enforcement agencies. They also except any situation where one party to the conversation knows of the eavesdropping.
Still another dimension of surveillance can be seen in the growing suspiciousness toward employees that has gripped much of U.S. industry. One of the nation’s fastest-growing trade associations is the American Society for Industrial Security. Its membership grew from 1800 to 2500 in two recent years. And at a recent convention members were treated to a comprehensive display of bugging devices. A Washington newspaper called them “more frightening than any Black Widow spider.” A spokesman for one of the displayers boasted that he didn’t believe there was “any escape from this sort of equipment.”
Along with the industrial espionage a new and more subtle surveillance is occurring throughout the land: psychological espionage of employees and school children.
The growing surveillance—and here I’ve just given a glimpse of its many manifestations—is inevitably exerting a significant impact upon the behavior patterns and value systems of the millions of citizens involved. The person who finds he is not trusted tends to strike back by becoming indeed untrustworthy. And the person who finds himself being watched, electronically or otherwise, tends unwittingly to become careful in what he does and says. This breeds not only sameness but a watchfulness completely untypical of the exuberant, free-wheeling American so commonly accepted as typical of this land in earlier decades. The American Civil Liberties Union has observed (correctly, I believe), “A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that the people are apprehensive of being overheard or spied upon.”
The former district attorney of Philadelphia, Mr. Samuel Dash, who made an exhaustive survey of eavesdropping in several states during the fifties,3 told a Senate committee: “In cities where wiretapping was known to exist there was generally a sense of insecurity among professional people and people engaged in political life. Prominent persons were constantly afraid to use their telephones despite the fact that they were not engaged in any wrongdoing. It was clear that freedom of communication and the atmosphere of living in a free society without fear were handicapped by the presence of spying ears.”
The closing in upon the privacy of the individual comes not only from the outright scrutiny of individuals but also from multiplying rules and regulations and from ever mounting requirements for licenses. There is the new insistence that one be traceable from cradle to grave. Bess E. Dick, staff director of the House Committee on the Judiciary, complained to me: “There is a crowding in.” You are required to “live just this way and no other way.” She felt the typical citizen is robbed of eccentricity.
Among the numerous rights heretofore considered characteristically