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Оглавление2. Five Forces Undermining Our Privacy
“The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.”—Chief Justice Earl Warren
In stable primitive societies the attitudes of the people in regard to what is proper and decent in personal relations—including respect for privacy—do not change much from century to century. In the Western world today, however, swirling forces are causing whole populations willy-nilly to change their attitudes, ideals, and behavior patterns within decades. This is nowhere more dramatically apparent than in the United States.
One effect of these forces is the undermining of respect for privacy. And there is a straining after even better ways to sort, inspect, control, and keep an eye on individuals.
I shall note here five of the forces produced by the changing nature of our society and technology with the hope that the reader will bear them in mind as underlying factors when we later examine their effects in detail. Throughout, our concern will be with these underlying forces, not with individual villains.
1. The Great Increase in Organized Living
In the coming decade another 40,000,000 people will be added to the population of the U.S., a figure approximately equal to all the people now living in the western half of the nation. And by the end of the present decade four-fifths of all Americans will be living in metropolitan areas. Until quite recent times most of the nation’s citizens had little experience of urban living with its tendency to reduce self-sufficiency and to require that the individual relate to large organizations.
Closeness of living does not necessarily destroy privacy. Holland is one of the most thickly populated nations in the world and yet, until very recently, individual privacy was greatly respected. But genuine considerateness toward others has not been a notable trait in the average American’s make-up for several decades. And as America’s empty spaces began filling up, the inhabitants developed an increasingly gregarious style of life. Perhaps they were over-reacting to what historian Walter Prescott Webb called “the nauseating loneliness of frontier life.” And perhaps now the overreacting is changing. But a few years ago an Argentine visitor referred to modern Americans (U.S. breed) as “friendly as puppies—and just as nosy.” A lag has developed between the habits of a people and the condition of their existence, so that personal privacy suffers.
Simultaneously there has been the continuous growth of giant organizations in U.S. society. Michigan State’s Professor Eugene Jennings observed that “organizations consume our privacy.” And Clark Kerr, now president of the University of California, has commented that the destruction of privacy seems to issue from the logic of organization itself.
As technology develops, it spawns large organizations—both business and governmental—to keep up with technology. U.S. society in a little more than a century has moved from being a nation of entrepreneurs to being a nation of employees. Most people today work for large organizations.
The larger an organization becomes, the more its managers seem to be obsessed with controls on the people involved, to keep the organization from flying apart. Since the top managers in bureaucracies cannot hope to know all the individuals in their organization they resort to appraisal forms, cumulative files, six-page application forms, and lie detectors as a means of “knowing” their people better. And being dedicated to rationality, the managers become obsessed with assigning numbers to people.
Congressman Kastenmeier relates that when his three-year-old son opened a $10 bank account the bank asked for the lad’s Social Security number. It may well be that within a few years organizational logic will require that a Social Security number be put on each newborn person’s birth certificate—and follow him to his grave.
Officially, one’s Social Security number is a well-guarded secret and cannot be used to keep track of people’s whereabouts. But I was told that some states have been using Social Security numbers to trace deserting fathers. And private detectives told me they had often got a man’s number merely by calling the personnel director of a company where the man was known to have worked. The standard form that investigators of one national investigative agency are supposed to fill out when checking up on a man specifies that his Social Security number be established.
Urban living has played a part in making citizens more fearful of being beset by criminals. In many urban areas these anxieties have a sound basis. In the first three months of 1963 the FBI’s Crime Index indicated that the volume of serious crimes had risen seven per cent during the preceding year. A growth in population and a growth in temptations in a nation increasingly swollen with material goods could help to account for much of the increase.
Law-enforcement officials cry out for more effective tools and techniques for catching the criminals. They argue that criminals have become so slick in developing organizations based on business models and in using the aids of modern technology that the law enforcers must be permitted to become slicker and rougher. The Police Review carried the headline: LEGALIZED WIRETAPPING ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, in quoting Brooklyn’s district attorney. The late New York tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, editorially called for the fingerprinting of all Americans.
News accounts of the prevalence of criminals have persuaded many millions of Americans, too, that the police must indeed become slicker and rougher. Much of the public anxiety about crime, incidentally, seems to be concentrated in urban redevelopment areas. Here the residents usually live in relatively expensive new apartments built in the midst of low-income areas where the people often are of different ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds and may be envious, resentful, or disdainful of their seemingly rich, stuck-up new neighbors.
At any rate we have the paradox of a society trying to put men on the moon when millions of its urban residents do not dare to walk alone at night in streets or parks near their homes.
The same society that breeds criminals by the millions demands that its police catch the criminals, even if they must trample on constitutional rights and existing laws to do so. There is little awareness that lawlessness is a symptom of national character and that the character must change before the symptoms can be significantly affected. To cite an extreme, a Methodist minister in Dallas charged, after President Kennedy’s assassination, that “the spirit of assassination” had flourished in Dallas for some time. There were reports of small children in several public schools clapping and cheering when their teachers told them of the terrible event. The children were reflecting not only the intolerance of their parents but the new genteel lawlessness that forgives assaults, in violation of law, against people who are disapproved of for one reason or another. In Northern cities genteel citizens have condoned the use by police of lawless or heavy-handed methods against suspects who happen to be members of minority groups that have produced a disproportionate share of disturbance of the peace of their particular urban society.
The United States cannot hope even to start becoming a law-abiding society until the great majority of its citizens know in their hearts that the constitutional rights of every citizen must be respected.
2. The Movement Toward a Garrison State Mentality
Although not the least bit militaristic as a people, Americans are being swept toward being a martial—and thus watched—society. The impetus comes from the facts of the cold war, the space race, and the growing appreciation of how defense and space spending spur the nation’s economy.
Tens of thousands of employees of federal agencies spend all or much of their time handling secret data. And then of course there are about 2,700,000 citizens in the U.S. armed forces who require varying degrees of surveillance based on their assignments.
More disquieting has been the spread of security precautions in U.S. industrial plants that do some business with the Pentagon. Business Week estimates that 24,000 industrial facilities are now under Pentagon regulations on security and that more than 3,500,000 industrial employees in the past fourteen years have had to obtain clearances.
Many of the companies are so anxious not to lose their contacts with the Pentagon that, to be on the safe side, they allow their security officers to push defense-type precautions into other areas of the company. In such instances little distinction in hiring and surveillance policy is made between employees working on defense contracts and those in the commercial, non-military phases of their company’s operations. The industrial security chief for Temco Electronics was quoted in 1962 as stating: “Regardless of where a man is going to work, his background should be looked at as carefully as if he were going to work on classified material.”
The fact that the United States has been involved in four hot wars during this century and in a prolonged cold war for most of the last two decades is responsible for the continual introduction of new surveillance techniques and social controls. What is disturbing, however, is that the government rarely relinquishes such wartime techniques and controls when the shooting ends.
In the national emergency of 1941 President Roosevelt, as Commander-in-Chief, quietly authorized his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to resort to wiretapping in urgent cases involving the nation’s security. This action was taken in the face of what seemed to be a flat prohibition against wiretapping for any reason. In 1934 Congress had voted such a prohibition when it enacted the now notorious Section 605 of the Communications Act.
Mr. Jackson found that one phrase, by straining, could be rationalized into an authorization to tap. That phrase said it was a crime to “intercept” and “divulge” messages. Mr. Jackson decided that for the emergency this could be stretched to mean that it was all right to intercept as long as you did not divulge. He chose to ignore a nearby phrase banning the “use” of any intercepted message.
The war emergency ended; but all of the U.S. Attorneys General since Mr. Jackson, including the incumbent one, have embraced his interpretation to justify wiretapping, when it seemed to be warranted, for “leads” only. And many local law-enforcement officials have echoed the Attorneys General. The interpretation has been mouthed so many times that people assume it is the “law.”
Another hangover of wartime measures is the use of recording devices attached to telephones to monitor calls you make or receive. Before World War II there was occasional use of such devices at the War Department, with the switchboard operators scrupulously notifying the party on the other end of the line that the call would be recorded. As the war emergency approached, the demand for recordings became so urgent that the Signal Corps installed a great many of the devices and notice to the calling party was discontinued! By 1945 more than 2000 of them were in operation. An FCC report in 1947 related that “The wartime experience gained with telephone recording devices has resulted in an unprecedented commercial demand since V-J day.” By 1947 there were 19,000 recorders in use in the U.S., three quarters of them by business organizations, with no legal requirement that the other party be notified. Meanwhile in Washington the use of monitoring continued to grow.
Consider a final example. Few people realize it, but a sedition statute that goes back to World War I and is still in effect declares it a crime willfully to make false statements about the U.S. armed forces that could interfere with their success or to make any kind of statements intended to discourage enlistments. This statute was revived in 1953 while the nation was in a state of emergency, while winding up the Korean War, and today the government refuses to declare the emergency ended. Perhaps it never will. Technically the Southerners who criticized use of federal troops during crises involving civil rights for Negroes could have been prosecuted for sedition since such statements conceivably might discourage enlistments in some areas. Similarly those Republicans who suggested that the Russians had not pulled their missiles out of Cuba could be prosecuted since this was contrary to official statements. No Attorney General in recent decades has chosen to enforce this statute in peacetime. But a would-be dictator could have a fine time using it to hound critics.
An even greater legacy of suspicion and surveillance has followed in the wake of the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union. The devious tactics of Communists provided very real grounds for acting vigorously to counteract them. But it is also unfortunately true that a good many people have focused all their anxieties and hostilities into a generalized fear of Communism, and that this fear has been exploited in many cases by members of the radical right to harass anyone with whom they seriously disagreed. Freedom to communicate thoughts and express unorthodox ideas has thus often, even in private discussions, been inhibited in many areas in recent years.
3. The Pressures Generated by Abundance
It may seem odd that affluence should undermine privacy, but it clearly has. There is evidence that much of the great increase in surveillance, investigation, and intrusion into people’s privacy can be traced to conditions arising from abundance.
Consider the problem of launching and moving goods in today’s superabundant economy. Styles in products are changing swiftly. The lifetime of product types is becoming ever shorter. And, there is increasing strain to find significantly new products or variants. All these factors have produced a greater preoccupation with secrecy. A company concerned with secrecy in industry begins to wonder who can be trusted and brings in the undercover agents to check on employees.
This pressure to move goods affects individual privacy in another way. Companies have been turning to more relentless selling tactics to attract our attention. Privacy diminishes as the hawkers telephone us several times a week, or shove their feet in the door while posing as survey makers.
Affluence has produced a tremendous increase in the use of credit and in the sale of all sorts of insurance policies. The sellers of both credit and insurance feel that to survive they must investigate the lives of prospects. Every insurance policy, for example, is a risk, a bet. The companies try to hedge their bets on policies of substance by arranging for a quiet investigation of the insured’s finances and living habits. And so we have millions of insurance investigations, often accompanied by a “neighborhood check”—and the findings often reach files from which information is swapped or sold.
The growth in the amount of spare time that most Americans can enjoy has in at least one way made privacy more difficult to achieve for many of them. Americans have more time now to read newspapers, magazines, and books and to watch TV and listen to radio. They want not only to be informed but to be entertained and, often, titillated. Many enjoy gossip and scandalous facts about fellow citizens. And many of the mass media have relentlessly sought to provide them with a steady diet of gossipy information. The result of both the desire for such information and the media’s efforts to supply it has in effect produced a combined assault on privacy. The dual nature of this assault is pointed up by Morris Ernst and Alan Schwartz in their definitive legal analysis of privacy as it is affected by the media.1 At one point they note that the desire “of the mass media to make a profit at the expense of our privacy is a growing pressure.” And they ask: “How should the ever-increasing thirst of the public for news and information be balanced against the sometimes desperate desire for privacy on the part of the individual?”
Finally we might simply note sociologist Kingsley Davis’ observation that the explosive growth of both possessions and people “is causing an ever larger portion of our high level of living to be used to escape from the consequences of congestion.”
4. The Growth of Investigation as a Private Industry
There are now not only thousands of firms offering their services as investigators but also a large number of management-consultant firms that derive most of their income from screening, assessing, or observing employees. And there are quite a few hundred psychologists who are happy to reap the bounty paid for screening, probing, and assessing managerial aspirants. Finally, a great many firms are eager to keep a steady stream of subjects harnessed to their lie detector machines. An official of one of the nation’s larger investigative agencies told me with a grin: “A lot of money can be made with lie detectors.”
Many of these enterprises with a vested interest in anxiety among business managers work strenuously to keep reminding the nation’s industrialists of the untrustworthiness or undependability of a good many employees. The president of the giant William J. Burns International Detective Agency wrote an article for Business Management that was entitled: “Does Your Plant Invite Theft?” He offered a 27-point check list of danger spots that needed to be watched, and called attention to the value of undercover operatives.
And a giant investigative firm based in Miami, the Wackenhut Corporation, has been bombarding managements with a brochure headed: “How Secure Is Your Business?” It asks: “Are your employees thoroughly screened before they are hired? . . . Have your offices been checked for the presence of electronic listening devices?” etc.
The growth of investigation as a full-fledged and potent industry has been greatly assisted by a new and unprecedented phenomenon. That is the fact that many thousands of men who have received thorough and intensive training in surveillance and investigative techniques by the U.S. Government have made themselves available in the possibly greener pastures of private enterprise.
Such highly trained investigators include not only former military and Central Intelligence Agency specialists in espionage, policing, intelligence, and counterintelligence but graduates of such other intelligence agencies as the Secret Service, former Treasury agents, former General Accounting Office watchdogs, civil service investigators, postal inspectors, and special agents of the FBI. These graduates number in the tens of thousands. Some have gone into jobs completely unrelated to their government specialties, but many thousands are making at least some use of their government training in watching or handling people in their new careers.
One of the nation’s more fabulous private investigators, John Cye Cheasty of New York, is a graduate of the U.S. Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit, and Navy Intelligence units. (He attained the rank of commander in the Navy.) In commenting on the techniques he uses as a private investigator when he is developing reports on business executives or candidates for executive jobs, he said he felt that investigators such as himself could do the job better than the usual representatives from a company’s personnel department. He explained:
“We have ways of getting information, ways of interviewing, that are different than the ways used by personnel departments. We can get to people we want to see faster because we have learned our techniques in the service. We have learned techniques for commanding attention, commanding the truth, and commanding the information without seeming to be aggressive or imperative about it. We can move in and take over an interview and get what we want.”
The role of the ex-FBI special agents in U.S. society offers an interesting case in point since they command, however justifiably, the most awe from the public. Industry courts them for all sorts of roles. In 1962 the Wall Street Journal carried the headline: MORE COMPANIES FIND MANAGEMENT TALENT AMOUNG EXFBI AGENTS.
There are now apparently at least three quarters as many ex-FBI agents as active FBI agents in the U.S. Approximately 6000 men are active agents, and the membership of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (national headquarters: 274 Madison Avenue, New York) is near 4500. Presumably not all former agents have bothered to maintain membership. The society prints a newsletter that serves as a sort of grapevine for the organization.
Among the ex-FBI agents are clergymen, admen, writers, professors, ranchers, bankers, oil operators, dentists, and a number of corporate presidents. They include at least one neurological surgeon. And of course there are a great many accountants and lawyers. The 1961 directory of the society listed as members two governors (New Mexico and North Carolina) and the attorney general of Florida (who gave as his regular occupation “special investigator”).
An interesting concentration of ex-FBI men, incidentally, has existed, at least until very recently, on the working staff of the American Security Council (Chicago), a militantly right-wing organization that is supported by several thousand companies and other organized groups. It disseminates information about what it considers to be statist and Communist conspiracies; publishes reports on national and international military and political developments as seen by its business or military-oriented analysts; and in the recent past it has provided information on names of employees or applicants submitted to it by corporate personnel officers of many of its member companies.
Our main interest in the Council, however, is in the following fact: As of 1962, its president, its administrative director, and its Washington bureau chief were all listed as ex-FBI men in the 1961 directory of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc.
The Society of Former Agents is considerably more than a fraternal organization. It is also a clearinghouse for information about jobs available, and it offers a directory of trained investigators available for special projects in just about every corner of the U.S.A. In the geographic part of the directory there is an asterisk after the name of each member who has indicated he is “available for work.”
In Indiana, for example, about half of all the society’s members are “available. “They are located in seventeen towns and cities. In New Jersey the “available” members can be reached in forty-six towns and cities. And in California there are ex-agents “available for work” in seventy-three towns and cities.
One of the more interesting entrants among the ex-agents who indicated in the 1961 directory that they were “available for work” was a police captain in Knoxville, Tennessee!
A random sampling of the 1961 directory suggests that several hundred of the former special agents are in charge of handling personnel at business corporations as either security officers, personnel directors, labor-relations directors, or industrial-relations directors. The Ford Motor Company, incidentally, had 39 ex-FBI special agents on its payroll in some capacity.
A check of all the society members who left the FBI in the years 1930, 1940, 1950, and 1960 reveals that 35 per cent of those who now have active careers are in jobs involving investigation, policing, or security enforcement.
Some of the former FBI men have banded together to form their own nationwide organizations for investigative assignments. One is Fidelifacts, a loose network of more than 200 former FBI agents. They operate on a franchise basis and either pay each other for investigations or have an exchange arrangement. (The name was recently changed from Fidelifax to Fidelifacts because people seemed to assume that Fidelifax should be a photocopying company.)
Fidelifacts has full-time offices in such places as Boston, Stamford, Albany, Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, New York City, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, Charlotte, Garden City, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Billings, Akron, Houston, Syracuse, and Minneapolis. It has in addition many part-time “resident reporters” operating in areas not yet large enough to support an office.
An outfit that has benefited spectacularly from the romance of the FBI label is the Wakenhut Corporation, headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. It is such a fast-burning business rocket that it is still something of a mystery to a number of people in the investigative field. In less than a decade it has grown from four private eyes into the fourth largest investigative and security organization in the nation, with a staff of 3500, complete with a lie-detector division.
All its announcements, and all public reports about it that I have seen, have stressed the fact that it was founded by ex-special agents of the FBI and is led by ex-FBI men. This is correct. George Wackenhut, a husky, jut-jawed, energetic man with a bone-crushing handshake, founded the organization in 1954 immediately after serving a three-year hitch with the FBI. Three of his colleagues also were former agents. And several of his top executives today are ex-FBI agents. But the client signing a large contract with Wackenhut Corporation in the expectation that he would be getting the exclusive services of ex-FBI men would be disappointed. In 1961 less than one per cent of its total staff were listed as ex-FBI men in the membership directory of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.
The business editor of the Miami Herald, in commenting on the phenomenal national growth of this local firm, mentioned that its FBI leadership gives it an advantage in signing up new industrial clients. He said Wackenhut has this special advantage in negotiating with industrial security officers “because a high percentage of industrial security officers were once with the FBI”!
5. The Electronic Eyes, Ears, and Memories
In the novel George Orwell wrote about the year 1984 he envisioned that the advances of electronics had enabled his fictional totalitarian leader to install a telescreen in each living space of the realm. In this way the tyrant could maintain virtually total visual and audio surveillance when he chose. As Orwell put it: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
If Mr. Orwell were writing his book today rather than in the 1940s his details would surely be more horrifying. Today there are cameras that can indeed see in the dark. There are banks of giant memory machines that conceivably could recall in a few seconds every pertinent action—including failures, embarrassments, or possibly incriminating acts—from the lifetime of each citizen. And brain research has progressed to the point where it is all too readily believable that a Big Brother could implant an electrode in the brain of each baby at birth and thereafter maintain by remote control a certain degree of restraint over the individual’s moods and behavior, at least until his personality had suitably jelled.
Fortunately for the human race, a good many people are becoming apprehensive about the wonders bestowed by electronic research. Fortunately also the expense of most of the devices prohibits their use against whole populations (though the prices are coming down), so the present uses are mostly selective. Nevertheless in the course of a year literally millions of Americans are watched or overheard electronically without their awareness at some time during any single week.
Let us pause for a moment to brief ourselves on the state of the “art” of electronic surveillance as of 1964. In subsequent chapters we shall see how the devices that have been developed are applied in many situations in ways that tend to annihilate the privacy and dignity of the citizens under scrutiny.
Each year several thousand TV cameras are sold to industry, and such giants as General Precision, General Electric, and RCA are among the companies selling them. Seattle’s classified phone directory lists fourteen local companies offering to sell or install closed-circuit TV. Many of the TV cameras used in industry are for such prosaic purposes as watching instrument panels or furnace operations; others are for watching people.
In some instances the people involved know about the people-watching, as at the gates of an IBM plant doing research work in Endicott, New York. In others it is done secretly.
Mr. Max Kanter—president of ITV in New York, which rents or sells closed-circuit installations—explained that if you wish to conceal the cameras even the lens need not show. He said: “If there is screening material or mesh to conceal the camera, and if it is focused at some point beyond, the lens can look right through the screening material.” (His charge for renting basic equipment for one week: about $200.)
The makers of TV cameras for surveillance have not only learned to miniaturize them to a thickness of only about four inches, but they have learned that by shooting into a mirror they can install the cameras vertically in a wall that has a four-inch air space. The fact that the FBI uses closed-circuit TV in some of its surveillance work came out in the trial of a Navy yeoman suspected of spying.
Hidden still cameras are also in wide use for recording the activities of people. A company called Cameras for Industry has been aggressive in selling plants, stores, banks, etc., on “Automatic Photo Systems” that can now be rented for “pennies a day.” The cameras operate silently, can take thousands of pictures in a single loading, and, it is explained, they can either be used openly or be concealed. The camera can be triggered by a photoelectric eye. Or if a clerk is handing you a document he can first insert it in a number-stamping machine, and the act of stamping will trigger a hidden camera beamed at you.
Then there are the tiny cameras used by investigators or others seeking evidence. Some are built into cigarette lighters. As the owner lights his cigarette, his thumb action simultaneously triggers the camera.
The impetus for the development of many of these remarkable surveillance devices came from defense and space research and from efforts to keep up with the Russians in this area. Advances in infrared photography (in the dark) resulted largely from research for aerial reconnaissance, as did automatic tripping devices for cameras. Many early developments in closed-circuit TV were for use in surveillance of machines and dials as well as people at missile launching complexes. Transistors made possible miniature transmitters for use in satellites where every ounce counts.
And then there was the evidence of remarkable Russian techniques that inspired the U.S. Government to plunge into research and development contracts in the fields of surveillance and counterintrusion. The discovery of that tiny microphone imbedded in the Great Seal of the United States that hung behind the U.S. ambassador’s desk in the Moscow embassy was more of a shock to our technicians than has ever been admitted. A man intimately familiar with the search for this microphone confided: “It was an advancement of the art by the Russians that we were not then up to. We were not equipped to spot it because they had placed across the street an enormous transmitter beamed to bounce signals off the buried cavity device, and that giant transmitter was operating in an ultra-high-frequency spectrum we were not equipped to detect.” The British embassy inspired the Americans to tear the ambassador’s office apart, literally, because our British cousins confided that they had detected at their own embassy a signal they couldn’t identify.
More than one hundred hidden listening devices have in recent years been found in U.S. embassies and residences in Soviet-bloc countries. A picturesque example of Soviet advances in miniaturization was discovered accidentally by a U.S. military attache at a Moscow bar when he picked up a martini not intended for him. The “olive” in it, according to a Time account, contained a transmitter, and the tiny toothpick stuck in it was an antenna.
One step the U.S. Government is now taking to protect secret discussions in its embassies in questionable countries is to ship portable rooms to the embassies. Such a room is sent as a knockdown package and assembled inside the embassy. It is shielded on all sides to prevent transmission of sound and is so built as to permit visual inspection under, over, and all around the “room” for any wires.
U.S. companies now can make microphones and transmitters just about as small as anyone could conceivably desire. Transmitters now available can fit inside a lipstick tube or ball-point pen or appear to be a lump of sugar. Microphones smaller than a twenty-five-cent piece are being made and widely used.
At least thirty U.S. companies are now involved in manufacturing electronic eavesdropping equipment. One of the larger companies, Solar Research, Inc., in Oakland Park, Florida, claims that in 1962, for example, its sales increased fourfold within a year. Some sell only to law-enforcement agencies; others sell only surveillance equipment to law-enforcement agencies but sell counterintrusion devices to private concerns; and some seem interested in selling anything they have to anyone who has the money to pay for the devices. There is no law against manufacturing or selling bugging devices, and pitifully few laws, FCC regulations, or court decisions against their use. I had no difficulty, for example, in obtaining catalogues from several companies. And I saw on display in the window of an electronics shop on Forty-third Street in New York City a device that automatically starts a tape recorder when a telephone conversation comes onto a line.
When one West Coast manufacturer of “bugs” was displaying his new models to the convention of the American Society for Industrial Security, he cautioned that sales were “subject to pertinent regulation.” But he added: “I cannot be responsible for the integrity of the user. . . . I’m not going to ask the buyer what he does with it.” (A leading electronics magazine, incidentally, has advertised for $22.50 a “Be a Spy” correspondence course that includes instruction in bugging.)
As for tiny tape recorders, their manufacturers have been conducting large-scale advertising campaigns in large-circulation newspapers and magazines. A full-page ad for the pocketsize Minifon cited not only its value in recording routine memos, conferences, etc., but pictured its “wrist-watch” microphone ... its “inconspicuous tie-clip microphone” . . . how the recorder could be “concealed” in one’s briefcase . . . and its “unique telephone pickup” for attaching to one’s telephone receiver to record phone conversations.
In the course of my research I was given a number of demonstrations on the arts of bugging and de-bugging by people who were clearly experts. Those offering their services to the public as anti-intrusion specialists were perhaps most willing to discuss openly the problems involved. Raymond Farrell, manager of Bondwitt Sound Engineering Co., in New York, explained: “If we’re serving the public, we’re anti-intrusion specialists; if we’re serving the law, lawfully, we’re intrusion specialists.”
As he and I were chatting in an office, he took out of his briefcase a transmitter the size of a small matchbook. At his suggestion we went down the hall to a room where two girls were chatting and with their permission placed it and its tiny microphone on a table several feet from them. We returned to the office where we had been talking. He closed the door and turned on his receiving box. The conversation of the girls came through loud and clear. He said the girls could be heard at least a block away, and perhaps two, depending on conditions.
The most impressive demonstration was put on for me by Ralph V. Ward of Mosler Research Products, Inc., in Danbury, Connecticut. He is one of the leading authorities in the free world on surveillance devices. His company and its predecessors pioneered in making miniature surveillance devices for federal agencies, including some in the international field. As vice-president of sales he spends a good deal of time in Washington taking orders and soliciting research and development contracts. “We have not run out of wonders,” he said. The Mosler company now also makes much of its equipment available to state and city agencies and to licensed investigative agencies. And it offers to industry for slightly more than $300 a “security” kit that contains a host of tools for detecting bugging devices—but none of the bugging devices themselves.
The amiable Mr. Ward generously spent most of a day giving me a chalk talk on the problems involved in both bugging and de-bugging and demonstrated, item by item, the tools that go into the pigskin satchels sold to federal and other official agencies. The filled satchels are produced in lots of a hundred and contain both bugging and de-bugging tools. One interesting item was a microphone mounted in rubber a quarter of an inch thick. It can be slipped under a hotel door. Another device was the spike mike: a microphone attached to a spike nearly a foot long. It can be driven into walls or doors, which serve as resonators.
I shall try to describe here my understanding of the latest achievements in microphoning techniques and tools as they were explained to me by expert informants, including Mr. Ward.
The challenge today is not to make the “bugs” small but to make them more undetectable, for use in spots where the occupants are security-oriented and likely to make checks. A transmitter, no matter how small, is fairly easy to spot by an anti-intrusion expert with room-“sweeping” equipment. He hears a squeal in his receiver when his electronic “mop” gets close to a hidden transmitter. A buried microphone with a tiny wire leading to a remote tape recorder is vastly more difficult to detect. Thus the transmitter is considered to be most appropriate for quick hit-and-run jobs, whereas the mike wired to a remote recorder is preferred for permanent installations.
Some of the preferred places to tape hidden microphones in a room are at the back of desk drawers (because people usually don’t go all the way back even when searching), in the upholstery, or the underside of a bed. If a long-term bugging with a transmitter is planned, there is an advantage in putting the transmitter in an electric clock or TV set or in a light fixture so that it can draw its power from the building’s electric power source.
Another favored spot for hiding bugging devices is within the frame of a picture on the wall. Mosler sells a nice pastoral scene that has a very thin transmitter pasted inside the paper covering the back of the picture. (Price: $215.) A visual search would not detect this transmitter even if the picture were taken off the wall. These pictures are particularly esteemed for installation in hotel or motel rooms where persons under surveillance are going to stay.
The base of a telephone is also a choice spot for making a quick installation of a bug: Mr. Farrell demonstrated to me that it can be done within one minute. There are two ways of installing the bug. A two-wire tap using a small transmitter in the base gives you only the telephone conversation. A three- wire tap includes a wire that jumps the hook switch and thus broadcasts all calls and in addition all conversation going on in the room when the phone is not in use.
As counterintrusion skills have advanced, the professionals have sought to place their microphones beyond the probing range of the metal-detection sweepers now widely used. This means placing the mike behind the wall—and as far away as possible. Mr. Ward explained:
“Normally the best way to bug is through a pinhole that is too small to see in the imperfections of the woodwork or the plaster. Visually, you wouldn’t find the pinhole.” (Researchers are at work to develop pinhole finders.) But even with a pinhole the presence of a microphone buried in the wall may produce a slight signal on the metal detector if it is just inside the plaster behind the pinhole opening. Now, Mr. Ward indicated, the tube mike has been developed. This permits you to put the mike several inches back from the pinhole. The tube, which can be a plastic resonator, leads from the pinhole to the mike and reduces the chances that the microphone will be detected by any metal-detecting device. Dr. Leo L. Beranek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an authority on acoustics, has described devices that can be placed on the outside wall of a room under surveillance. Voices inside the room set up mechanical vibrations that may be detected by such a device placed against the outer wall. Most experts hired for counterintrusion work feel insecure unless they can inspect all rooms around, above, and below the room they are guarding for any signs of bugging activities.
As for the highly directional microphones that reputedly can pick up conversations from great distances, a sizable folklore on the reach of such microphones has developed. Published reports that they can pull in voices from 1200 feet away or through closed windows are apparently without basis. But apparently some do bring in conversations 100-150 feet away under moderately noisy conditions and up to 500 feet if conditions are ideal (quiet).
The first of these miracle mikes to receive much attention was the parabolic microphone, placed at the focal point of a reflector. Such giant saucers were first developed on a large scale during World War II, before radar, and proved to be much more sensitive than the human ear in detecting approaching aircraft. An effective parabolic mike requires a reflector with a diameter of at least three and preferably six feet. This makes it somewhat cumbersome for most sleuthing purposes, but it can be concealed behind bushes, or in an open truck, or in the darkened balcony of a conference room.
Another kind of long-range mike is the so-called machine-gun type, consisting of a bundle of tubes of varying lengths, each of which brings the sound to a microphone at the rear. Such an arrangement of tubes tends to eliminate most sounds not almost directly to the front. Cumbersomeness is again a problem. The picture of the one I saw in operation indicated that the longest of the pipes was about seven feet. The man using it was behind bushes. A Senate subcommittee was told that this type of mike proved to be practical in gaining evidence of blackmail involving a motion picture actor in California. The blackmailer, being suspicious that the man might wear a bug, specified that the actor meet him at a remote place on a beach and wear only bathing trunks. The actor complied but a machine-gun mike a few hundred feet away in the dark was able to pick up enough of their talk to provide incriminating evidence.
Still a third type of long-range mike is produced by Electro-Voice, which specializes in developing microphones for broadcasters. Recently it developed a single-barrel mike about seven feet long. All major TV networks have used it to pick up the voices of questioners at presidential press conferences . . . to pick up the sounds of distant bands in parades . . . and to pick up—from the side lines—the voices and sounds of body impact of players at football games. The National Football League now has banned it because it was picking up and broadcasting too many obscenities. Electro-Voice has had inquiries from—and made sales to—a number of customers who may well have been investigators, but it has no knowledge of how many are actually being used in investigative work, since these users keep pretty quiet about their methods of operation. Its big mike costs about $1000. A simpler non-electronic way to eavesdrop on distant conversations—if the eavesdropper does not need recorded evidence—is to employ a lip reader with binoculars.
One of the most prevalent forms of bugging is a concealed mike-transmitter on the body. Miniaturization has made this feasible; and unfortunately there is little reason to fear prosecution.
Many experts favor placing the mike behind the tie, fairly low down so as not to pick up interference from the heartbeat. Tape recorders are now small enough so that there is little chance they will be detected if taped to the body.
However the experts prefer concealed transmitters rather than recorders. The transmitter will broadcast to a tape recorder that can be several hundred feet away, and even a fairly powerful transmitter can be made much smaller than a good concealable recorder. Also it can operate without reloading longer than a tape recorder. And even if a person is caught with it during a frisk the information obtained up to that point cannot be destroyed, and if necessary help can be dispatched. The transmitter can be carried on a coat pocket with its antenna going up to the armpit and down the sleeve. One of the best places to put either a transmitter or small recorder, according to a man who has submitted to police frisks to test his theory, is just above the coccyx. Another favored way of concealing a transmitter and mike is to pack them inside a king-size cigarette package designed to feel, to the touch, soft as a package of cigarettes.
To complete our rundown on bugging devices, there are a variety of tailing aids that can be attached to an automobile. One simple transmitter broadcasting a pulsing tone signal is mounted on four magnets and can be attached to any clean metal surface under the car in a matter of seconds. It can be heard for a mile.
The “art” of wiretapping—which is at least technically a more illicit form of eavesdropping—has also seen some advancements in recent years. One is a miniature transmitter that can be attached to the tapped listening post. This is not only more convenient, but has the advantage of reducing the chance the tapper can be traced if a tap is discovered.
Tappers frequently pose as telephone repairmen, and some who engage in tapping on a large scale even buy or build imitations of the green telephone-company trucks.
Tools for the more elementary kinds of direct wiretapping cost less than $25. And for $4.25 one can purchase a little device that feeds a telephone conversation into a tape recorder. It can be installed in three seconds by pressing its suction attachments against the back of the telephone receiver.
However, when one gets into transmitters, automatic recorders, and many of the microphoning tools that we’ve discussed, the prices soar. A professional eavesdropper is likely to require an expensive bag—or truckload—of tools. An examination of four catalogues issued by producers of surveillance equipment (Mosler, Tracer Electronics, Inc., W. S. J. Electronics, and R. B. Clifton Electronics Surveillance Equipment) gives some idea of an eavesdropper’s overhead. Here are some sample prices:
—Transmitters for wireless wiretapping. Prices range from $65 to $200 depending upon whether signal must be broadcast one block or three.
—Picture frame transmitter, $215.
—General-purpose transmitter to be planted inside room, $95 to $137, presumably depending on quality.
—Transmitters for concealment on body, $150 to $220.
—Device for automatically starting tape recorder when conversation begins on tapped telephone line, and stopping when conversation stops, $76 to $105.
Since a few states ban even the possession of wiretapping equipment by private parties, the Clifton catalogue states at the end of its price list: “Caution—in many parts of the world there are certain laws which prohibit using some of the items above. It is the sole responsibility of the buyer (and not the seller) to ascertain through legal counsel how these laws may apply to the use of each item purchased.” Tracer Electronics simply notes after some of its items: “Sold for use subject to pertinent regulations.” And the proposed FCC regulations restricting use of radio transmitters for electronic eavesdropping, if and when promulgated, will in no way affect the selling of such devices, but will only make the users warier of their legal position.
A quite different kind of electronic surveillance—and control—has become possible through the development of the giant memory machines. Each month more and more information about individual citizens is being stored away in some gigantic memory machine. Thus far, the information about individuals is usually fed into the super-computers to serve a socially useful or economically or politically attractive purpose. But will it always be? This might especially be asked concerning those memory machines that are building up cumulative files on individual lives.
All the storing and accumulating of information makes one wonder. Dr. Robert Morison, director of Medical and Natural Science for the Rockefeller Foundation, has commented: “We are coming to recognize that organized knowledge puts an immense amount of power in the hands of people who take the trouble to master it.” It may be significant that increasingly it is those who hold the office of comptroller in U.S. corporations who rise so frequently to the presidencies. Their control of the computers gives them an edge on information over their competitors.
If information is power, Americans should be uneasy about the amount of information the federal government is starting to file on its citizens in its blinking memory banks. There are, for example, the gigantic memory machines that the Internal Revenue Service is starting to use to check data from our tax returns against data accumulated about us from other sources, such as employers and banks. The computers also watch for unlikely patterns. Obviously these memory banks are useful tools for fair and efficient tax collecting. But what are the implications for two decades from now, in 1984? If future bureaucrats choose, they can build up so-called “cum,” or cumulative files, on each taxpayer over decades, and thus will have, instantly recallable, a vast amount of personal information about the living habits of every adult in the realm.
One computer maker, Bernard S. Benson, bluntly concedes that concentration of power in the form of accumulated information can be “catastrophically dangerous.” He suggests that individual privacy ultimately may be at the mercy of the man in a position to push the button that makes the machine remember. At an international conference on information processing sponsored by UNESCO in Paris, he reminded his colleagues that it was “high time” they started devoting part of their conferences to discussing how to insure that any new accomplishments will be beneficial to mankind.
Whatever the benefits, the marvelous new electronic devices with memories or ears or eyes are serving to push back the boundaries of each individual’s privacy. As we shall shortly see, the electronic eyes and ears are being put to a host of ingenious uses for the purpose of people-watching.
These five forces that are at work in the society of the United States—and to some degree in most highly industrial societies of the world—have accounted for an immense growth of surveillance over individual citizens and a massive invasion of their privacy.
