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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, its furnishings and upkeep, and what kinds of locks there are on your doors.

—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 American that we seem to be in danger of scuttling are:

—The right to be different.

—The right to hope for tolerant forgiveness or overlooking of past foolishnesses, errors, humiliations, or minor sins—in short, the Christian notion of the possibility of redemption.

—The right to make a fresh start.

America was largely settled, and its frontiers expanded, by people seeking to get away from something unpleasant in their pasts, either oppression, painful episodes, poverty, or misdemeanors.

Today it is increasingly assumed that the past and present of all of us—virtually every aspect of our lives—must be an open book; and that all such information about us can be not only put in files but merchandised freely. Business empires are being built on this merchandising of information about people’s private lives. The expectation that one has a right to be let alone—the whole idea that privacy is a right worth cherishing—seems to be evaporating among large segments of our population.

There appears to be little awareness today among the complacent that no one is secure unless everyone is secure from the overeager constable, the over-zealous investigator, and the over-nosy bureaucrat. Totalitarianism typically begins when a would-be tyrant—whether a Hitler or a Castro—plays upon the anxieties of the majority to institute repressive measures against despised or troublesome minorities. Gradually the repressive measures are extended, perhaps inexorably, to larger and larger segments of the populace.

It was to protest the possibility of such an eventuality in the U.S.A. that Mr. Justice Brandeis issued his eloquent dissent in a case in 1928 involving surveillance. He said:

“The makers of our Constitution . . . sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most valued by civilized men.”

Today, as we shall see, the Bill of Rights is under assault from many directions. Thomas Jefferson’s vow that he had sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man has a quaint ring to many people in 1964. Aldous Huxley commented that the classic cry of Patrick Henry that he wanted either liberty or death now sounds melodramatic. Instead today, Huxley contended, we are more apt to demand, “Give me television and hamburgers but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.”

It is worth noting that Mr. Huxley’s prophetic book, Brave New World, written way back in the thirties about a technological society living in doped-up bliss under a watchful tyrant six centuries from now, has been banned from several U.S. schools. Also among the banned is George Orwell’s 1984, depicting life under the ever-present electronic eye and ear of a tyrannical Big Brother a bare two decades from now. When the U.S. Commissioner of Education was asked about the banning of these two classics from a Miami high school, he declined to comment because he said he had never heard of either of the books!

Many of the present invasions of our privacy originate in the kinds of life the citizens have chosen to pursue. Often such intrusions can be checked only by an aroused concern about individual rights. Other of the invasions, as we shall see, are susceptible to legal restraint. In general the legal checks are in a state of lamentable confusion, vagueness, or neglect. One judge has described the state of the law of privacy, for example, as “still that of a haystack in a hurricane.”

In the chapters that follow, let us then try to understand what is happening to our privacy—and our freedom—as individuals in the face of the new kinds of pressure generated by our violently changing world. As we explore this subject we might bear in mind a haunting comment made to me by Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, who has led several battles for individual rights on the floor of Congress. He said:

“Basically I am not hopeful about the pressures that will in time make our country something of a police state. Unless we can bring a release from the prolonged Cold War and can check the inward drift of our country, I sense a losing game.”