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INTRODUCTION

There is nothing worse than dated social criticism. So when the good folks at Ig Publishing invited me to write this introduction, my initial reaction was skepticism. What could a jeremiad about the epidemic of Americans spying on one another, published in 1964—thirty years before the invention of the Internet, thirty-seven years before 9/11, written in an age when the gravest insults to civil liberties consisted of congressional committees asking “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party”—have to say to us now?

I picked up an ancient paperback copy of The Naked Society (“The explosive facts behind the hidden campaign to deprive Americans of their rights to privacy. Here’s how snoop devices are being employed by Big Government, Big Business, and Big Educaiton in their sneak attack on YOU.”). I began reading. I was in New York City—Penn Station, to be exact. I read Packard’s framing questions: “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?” As I read this, I happened to notice a TV screen. Horrifying, apocalyptic images of buildings collapsing and shadowy terrorists alternated with messages like, “If you see anything suspicious report it to an Amtrak employee.” And, “It’s nothing, you think. Can you be sure?” After all: “It doesn’t hurt to be alert.”

I began reading with renewed, then steadily mounting, interest, my mind buzzing as the parallels between then and now presented themselves. Packard wrote, “the New York Police [have] about 200 plain-clothes men working virtually full time at wiretapping.” That was then. This is now: the New York Police spend $1 billion on an intelligence unit, led by an active-duty Central Intelligence Agency Official, to infiltrate the Muslim community and spy on mosques. The NYPD admits the program has never produced a single terrorism lead).¹ Then: Packard quotes Sam Dash—who before becoming a household name as chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee, was a leading civil liberties expert—that a “district attorney, in office, catches an occupational disease. He resents impediments in his way that prevent him from collecting evidence to convict criminals.” Now: computer wizard Aaron Swartz earns an FBI investigation for the legal act of downloading federal court files; then, after harmlessly downloading too many scholarly articles from MIT’s computer system, he is indicted by the office of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz for charges that could have brought him thirty-five years in prison. Experts say he should have earned a slap on the wrist, if that, but prosecutors hound him so mercilessly he commits suicide.²

Then: welfare inspectors in Kern and Alameda Counties, California, stage late-night raids on 500 houses to investigate whether there is a man living in the household so they can cut off relief. Now: bills in states including Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, and Wyoming propose drug tests for welfare recipients (Republicans in Congress have introduced bills to submit recipients of both welfare and unemployment insurance to drug tests), and state legislators in Tennessee consider a law to kick families off welfare if their kids get bad grades.³

Then: “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.” Now: the Justice Department secretly obtains two months of telephone records of at least twenty Associated Press reporters and editors, including for home phones and cell phones; as of this writing, the government will not say why it sought the records, or how, nor whether a grand jury was involved. They only would say that U.S. attorneys follow “all applicable laws, federal laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,” and that “we do not comment on ongoing criminal investigations.”⁴ Journalists have been both victims and perpetrators of such spying: just days before the AP story broke had come news that employees of Bloomberg News were availing themselves of a “Snoop” function that let them tap into the accounts of subscribers to the company’s financial information network.⁵

Then: Packard writes of his horror that “cabled TV” will allow the “possibility of getting ‘an instantaneous readout’ home by home of what millions of people are [watching] in the entire country in about fifty seconds.” Now: regarding the cables that connect our computers to networks of servers around the world, there have been too many horror stories to count, and more on that below. Then, “In some instances undercover men have been sent into plants to report on workers attitudes toward the union that is recognized or is seeking union recognition, and to report on union strategy”; in one case a detective insinuated himself so effectively into a textile plant the rank and file voted him onto the employee bargaining community. Now—well, too many horror stories to count on the labor front, too, but a great place to start is Human Rights Watch’s 215-page report “Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of U.S. Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association” on how the world’s largest corporation and its owners “violate their employees’ basic rights with virtual impunity.”⁶

By now you get the point. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a book that should be read, and carefully. This runaway bestseller in its own time indicts us—not just because the privacy crisis that began taking shape in Packard’s own time has grown so much worse, but because nobody any longer writes bestsellers about it. Re-reading The Naked Society can help us understand why.

II.

Vance Packard was born in 1914 in Granville Summit, Pennsylvania and raised in nearby State College, where his dad was a superintendent at the Penn State University farm. He majored in English there and worked for the literary magazine, earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, and entered the newspaper business, eventually becoming a feature writer for the Associated Press, then a freelance magazine writer focusing on social science and human behavior.⁷

“He is of medium height, medium age, talks slowly, loses the thread of what he is saying, regains it, acts on the whole like a professor at a small college a little unsure of tenure and with an important lecture coming up with the president in attendance. At the typewriter he is something else again.”⁸ The New York Times Magazine said that in a profile when Packard was at the height of his influence, when that influence was very high indeed. His first book, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), on advertising, compared the hidden field of “motivational research” to “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother.” The book also introduced the concept of “subliminal projection”—images flashed on screens too quickly for the conscious mind to register but long enough, Packard claimed, to instill longings in individuals they didn’t know they actually had. The ad industry responded indignantly, and denies the practice to this day.⁹ But the intensity of their backlash attested to the success of Packard’s message: the book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. (As for whether subliminal project is still practiced, that remains an active debate decades later—for instance after Democrats alleged a George W. Bush ad emphasized the word “RATS” in a chyron reading “BUREAUCRATS” during the 2000 presidential campaign.¹⁰)

Packard’s successive books, The Status Seekers (1959); “under the gloss of prosperity,” it argued, society was becoming more and more corroded by “new ways to draw lines that will separate the elect from the non-elect”), and The Waste Makers (1960). an exposé of “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals” which presciently foregrounded environmental concerns) were also number one bestsellers, an extraordinary run. It was around that time that Betty Friedan heard Packard lecture and decided to turn the magazine article she was planning based on a questionnaire she circulated to her fellow members of Smith College’s Class of 1942 on their experiences since graduation into the book which became The Feminine Mystique.¹¹

Packard’s work, in fact, heralded a golden age of American social criticism that played an outsized role in shuddering the country out of the somnolent fifties. The conventional wisdom, as the sixties began, was stated by the nation’s young president in 1962: that most of the day’s problems “are are problems, administrative problems”—that is to say, not really problems at all.¹² As I wrote in my book on the period, Before the Storm, those few writers who demurred were spending most of their energy begging people to acknowledge that serious social problems existed.

Three masterpieces of left-wing social criticism appeared around the same time in 1962 and 1963, the year before The Naked Society appeared. In The Other America, Michael Harrington argued forcefully that there appeared to be little poverty in the United States because in that poverty was hidden; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique which said that women were miserable because they could not call out the name of their problem; and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, on the subtle, progressive degradation of the environment. Such figuration of the implicit—hidden persuaders; problems with no name—were articulated most explicitly in the New Left manifesto penned by Tom Hayden in 1962. The Port Huron Statement said that America’s alleged consensus of happiness might “better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties.” James Baldwin entitled his 1963 collection of essays The Fire Next Time; the Establishment was aware there was kindling on the ground.¹³

With Packard, such books helped demonstrate how eager readers were for work that could articulate how civilization they were supposed to be celebrating was failing them. The New York Times Book Review, in a long and glowing front page essay they devoted to The Status Seekers, noted the paradox: that Packard’s “books on various shortcomings of American society—hidden persuaders, status seekers, waste makers—have without exception been welcomed with almost fervent enthusiasm by many members of the society they partially condemn.”¹⁴ Not so partially, actually. Wrote biographer Daniel Horowitz, whose Vance Packard and American Social Criticism came out in 1994, Packard “went farther in asking his readers to question basic assumptions about the beneficence of the American society and economy” than just about anyone else—and was devoured by readers nevertheless.¹⁵

The Naked Society was published in March of 1964, one month after the Beatles arrived on the tarmac at Idelwood Field, two months before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society speech resounded with the Packardian aspiration that “the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” and just as Barry Goldwater was campaigning in the New Hampshire primary on behalf of a conservatism (as 1960’s Conscience of a Conservative, arguably another monument to the new critical wave, put it) that “knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.”¹⁶ It spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Packard had been kicking around ideas with his publisher for his next project for a year. First, he began researching a book about private investigators.¹⁷ But his clipping file soon became dominated by a parallel obsession: the extraordinarily detailed questionnaires applicants for employment as diverse as gas station attendant and corporate executives, probing everything from Cold War “security risk” (Lockheed: “Does he [she] have relatives abroad?” “Has he [she] traveled abroad?” “If [employee] is youth or woman, what is reputation of parents or husband?”) to the most intimate matters of personal conduct and psychology. At that, he had his subject: a survey of “the numerous rights heretofore considered characteristically American that we seem to be in danger of scuttling,” from “the right to be different” to the “right to a fresh start.”

III.

There are two broad reasons why it can be valuable to revisit a long-ago text like The Naked Society. The first is for all the ways it remains relevant to us—how it helps us grasp the evolution of the world we live in now. The second is for such a work’s irrelevance. An old book that suspends in amber mores that are alien to us now—the past as a foreign country—can be the best way to grasp the accomplishments of our own society. In that regard, The Naked Society is valuable, too. Specifically, it is a remarkable resource for students of gay and lesbian history, and historians of sexuality generally, a subject upon which Packard’s findings are gloriously, triumphantly dated.

The mid-twentieth century was a moment of panic over any perceived deviance from sexual normalcy. One of the most fascinating patches of the book concerns the extraordinarily intrusive psychological testing children were subject to in schools. One consisted of eleven pictures of a dog named Blacky (the “Blacky Test”) purported to evaluate kids on “Dimensions” including “Oral Eroticism” (a cartoon captioned, “Here is Blacky with Mama...”), “Anal Sadism” (“Here Blacky is relieving himself (Herself. .),” “Here Blacky is watching Tippy. . .” (“Castration Anxiety [M] or Penis Envy [F]).”

Employment applicants were even worse. In a stunning set piece, Packard takes the reader inside a polygraph examination of a poor soul named Bill who is applying for a job as a traveling salesman of consumer products:

“Ever fired for cause?”

“Never.”

“Ever drink to excess?”

“I’ve been loaded a few times, but I guess that’s not ‘excess,’ so I’ll say no.”

And so on. Until we arrive at this extraordinary passage:

“‘Have you ever done something that you are really truly ashamed of?’ Bill shook his head. My guide whispered, ‘That question will sometimes smoke out the homosexual.’...

“Bill was unharnessed...The examination seemingly was over, and Bill was looking for his hat. Then Mr. Probe said pleasantly, ‘Bill, one more question before you leave. There is nothing personal or offensive about this, but because of the kind of business you are going in and the fact you have been in the summer theater work, I think I should ask it. Are you inclined to be a homosexual?’

“Bill looked startled. He said, ‘No.’ But the question so unsettled him that he felt compelled to explain his situation. ‘I have of course been surrounded by them in my work in the theater in the Midwest, and I’ve been exposed to this a lot in some of the bohemian areas where I’ve lived, and I have been approached. But the answer is no.’ Mr. Probe didn’t explain why sexual status had any significant relevance to the job for which Bill was applying.”

The inquisition about “homosexuality,” is mostly irrelevant. The polygraph stuff, however, throws us right back into the first category of reasons The Naked Society is worth reading. Lie detectors, then and now, are a scam and an affront to privacy rights. Packard writes of one psychiatrist’s conclusion that they were more a “tool for mental intimidation” than a reliable apparatus for the detection of lies, and of a joint Harvard and MIT study that polygraphs may have no more than 70 percent accuracy. Even that was only in the hands of a competent investigator, unlikely in an entirely unregulated industry.

The spring the book came out, a Democratic California congressman, John Moss, began hearings on the subject. He was soon announcing, “I would never submit to a polygraph unless accompanied by my personal physician, my lawyer, and my psychiatrist.” His subcommittee later concluded that “there is no such thing as a lie detector.”¹⁸ Unions, Packard noted, were lobbying for legislation to have them outlawed. They failed, of course—and their manufacturers still claim 90 percent validity, even though the National Research Council has found no evidence for their effectiveness. In United States v. Scheffer (1998), the Supreme Court left their use up to the states—and nineteen allow polygraph testimony to be admitted into evidence. Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, and Iowa eventually banned polygraph testing as a condition of employment, or in the investigation of wrongdoing by employers.¹⁹ That, of course, means forty-five states have not.

IV.

We still stand naked in our society—more shiveringly than ever before. Consider the workplace. Packard profiles companies like Bishop’s Service (motto: “A Man’s Whole Life Precludes The Single Deed”), which maintained files of five million names for clients seeking executive talent; organizations like the American Society for Industrial Security, whose membership grew from 1800 to 2500 in two years; a staggeringly fast-growing company named Wackenhut that specialized in renting out former FBI agents (they are now the largest private prison company in the world). He also studies the prevalence of cameras in employee bathrooms, miniature transmitters installed inside toilet paper rollers, factory surveillance—”At thousands of plants no one is to be trusted in any sense in which we’ve traditionally known the word”—and what one expert called “psychological espionage”: personality testing, sometimes in disguised form, was rampant, with a “special interest in trying to determine whether the applicant is adaptable enough to be a good team player...is money-minded (that is good)...is controversial or a ‘screwball’ (those are bad).” This despite the findings, according to the Harvard Business Review, of those tests’ “dismal history” of scientific reliability.”

So what is the state of the art now?

According to Ann Murphy Paul, author of The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (2005), 2500 such tests are on the market and being utilized by corporations now—an entirely unregulated industry (including the notorious and entirely unscientific Rorschach “inkblot” test)—not to mention their use in “the admissions processs at private schools, the evaluation of learning and behavior problems, and the investigation of child custody and child abuse cases.”²⁰

Meanwhile, employment applicants these days do not have to establish their heterosexuality in order to get hired. Instead, they have to lay bare their credit ratings—quite possibly creating, in the not-too-distant future, a blacklisted underclass rendered permanently unemployable because of their bad financial luck some time in the distant past.²¹ (So much for Packard’s invocation of one of the rights heretofore considered characteristically American that we seem to be in danger of scuttling: the right to a fresh start.)

And what about workplace spying? Google led me to an article in a newsletter called “Business Watch” that noted, “Employee monitoring is becoming a standard practice in just about every industry. . . . A 2001 American Management Association Association survey found that three-quarters of all major companies record and review employee communications and on-the-job activities.” Most employers install software programs like “Investigator” which “allows an employer to monitor everything a user does on a computer, including opening windows and posting items in chat rooms. It then sends an activity report via email to the employer.” Other programs flag taboo words selected by employers, or classify emails by the number of words sent, or measure the amount of time an employee spends composing, or even reading, email.

What is permitted, and what is not? In Wisconsin, I learned from “Business Watch,” statutes specify that employees have a right to be free from intrusion in circumstances that “reasonable people would consider to be private, such as using the bathroom”—but that “much of what is considered private is ultimately based on what employers tell their employees to expect. ‘If, say, they’re committed to maintaining the security and integrity of the office by reserving the right to inspect lockers and offices, then it’s clear lockers and desks aren’t considered private space,’” the article quoted a lawyer named Tom Godar. Courts have generally upheld this and employers’ rights to monitor just about anything else without disclosing to employees they are being monitored, I learned. And though the Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits unauthorized or warrantless electronic interception of oral communication, “there are several key exceptions: 1) Employers are allowed to monitor business-related activities if the monitoring is in the ordinary course of business, and 2) The employer is exempted from ECPA if its employees agree to be monitored.” So it is that “employer-issued cell phones” have become “a monitoring technique that is gaining popularity, which allow employees to trace the whereabout of their traveling employees.” Kind of like the ankle bracelets parolees where, only for traveling salesmen.

Scary stuff, and I braced myself to enjoy the jeremiad to follow. I was disappointed. The piece was called “Workplace Spying: How Far Can Companies Go,” and I was halfway through it before I realized its answer was “not 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 killed in no-knock raids.³³ No one gives a good goddamn.

Nor do we care much about what Packard calls “the Lively Trade in Facts About Us”—the intrusive collection and sale of mailing lists about what we consume, for instance—or that, “Each month more and more information about individuals is being stored away in some giant memory machine.” The “progressive” candidate Barack Obama built his 2012 reelection campaign collecting just such “micro-targeting” information about voters, to no objection I can find—just celebration of its technological glories.³⁴ Packard was taken aback that, in a survey of 400 companies that check on the health of executives (an intrusion he found offensive in itself) “only one firm in ten permitted the executive to go to a doctor or clinic of his own choice.” (No HMOs in 1964.) Other offenses then that don’t register now: the 35 percent of former FBI agents working in investigation or security, spying on school bathrooms to avoid vandalism, the biographical X-rays people have to submit to for federal employment, “Washington’s Version of ‘This Is Your Life’”—still in effect: a friend of mine, for a minor job with the Parks Service had to submit a list of five people who had known him for at least ten years, complete with phone numbers. “I almost,” he told me, “had to make people up.”

When people learned about this kind of stuff in 1964, they began indignant. Though, in fact, not nearly enough for the New York Times Book Review’s critic who found “a woefully common lack of indignation on the part of the bugged.” He also quoted the American Civil Liberties Union: “A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that the people are apprehensive of being overheard or spied upon.”

Well, hardly anyone is apprehensive now. I wonder: if a totalitarian society is one in which people are scared of their privacy being invaded, what do you call ours, in which no one seems much to care?

—Rick Perlstein

1. Matt Sledge, “NYPD Muslim Surveillance Report Details ‘Collateral Damage of Progarm,” Huffington Post, March 11, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/nypd-muslimsurveillance_n_2855303.html; “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas,” Associated Press, August 24, 2011, http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=8323847

2. “The Swartz Suicide and the Sick Culture of the DOJ,” Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, January 23, 2013, http://masslawyersweekly.com/2013/01/23/the-swartz-suicide-and-the-sick-culture-of-the-doj/

3. John Celock and Arthur Delaney, “Drug Testing Bills Proliferate in State Legislatures,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/drug-testing-welfare_n_3063962.html

4. Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman, “Phone Records of Journalists of the Associated Press Seized by U.S.,” New York Times, May 13, 2012

5. Amy Chozick, “Bloomberg Admits to Terminal Snooping,” New York Times, May 13, 2013.

6. Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of U.S. Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association (Human Rights Watch, 2007)

7. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

8. Lewis Nichols, “Talk With Vance Packard,” New York Times, March 15, 1964.

9. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

10. Julian Borger, “Dirty Rats Leave Gore a Subliminal Message,” The Guardian, September 12, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/sep/13/uselections2000.usa

11. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

12. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), p. 209

13. Ibid.

14. John Brooks, “There’s Somebody Watching You: The Naked Society, by Vance Packard,” New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1964, p. 1.

15. Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 120

16. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepardsville, KY: Victor Publishing, 1960), p. 11.

17. Lewis Nichols, “Talk With Vance Packard,” New York Times, March 15, 1964.

18. Lawrence Laurent, “Eavesdroppers Now Sophisticated Pests,” Washington Post, May 23, 1964; Associated Press, “LBJ Sets Up Committee for Lie Detector Study,” Daytona Beach Morning Journal, December 14, 1965.

19. Wikpiedia, “Polygraph,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

20. Ann Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. xiv, 157.

21. Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job (New York: Demos, 2013).

22. Mark Crawford, “Workplace Spying: How Far Can Companies Go,” BusinessWatch, nd, accessed May 10, 2013.

23. Laura M. Sands, “Spying on Employees—Is It Ethical?,” “Your Eye on Security Alerts, Blogs, News, and Videos,” July 30, 2012, http://www.homesecuritystore.com/blog/2012/07/30/spying-on-employees-is-it-ethical/

24. Erik Serhman, “No Facebook Privacy for Cheaters (Or Anyone Else),” CBS Money Watch, May 10, 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505124_162-57583881/no-facebook-privacy-for-cheaters-or-anyone-else/

25. Received April 26, 2013.

26. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 556-57.

27. Murtaza Hussain, “Exile the Obama Way,” Aljazeera. com, February 5, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/201324165957645514.html.

28. David K. Shipler, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties (New York: Knopf, 2011); Rights At Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 2012).

29. Email, May 13, 2013.

30. Publishers Weekly, February 7, 2011.

31. March 18, 1964 New York Times, Doubleday bookstore; Edmund Fuller, “The Bookshelf: A Pair of Indictments of Privacy-Invaders,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1964; Glendly Culligan, “Brothers of Assorted Sizes Are Kibitzing on Our Lives,” Washington Post, March 18, 1964; for Stewart Alsop see June 15, 1964 Edmonton Journal.

32. Patrick Johnson, “After Atlanta Raid Tragedy, New Scrutiny of Police Tactics,” Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 2006; email May 11, 2013.

33. Radley Balko, “No SWAT,” Slate, April 6, 2006, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2006/04/no_swat.html

34. See, for instance, Alexis C. Madgrigal, “When the Nerds Go Marching In,” The Atlantic, November 16, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marchingin/265325/

35. John Brooks, “There’s Somebody Watching You: The Naked Society, by Vance Packard,” New York Times Books Review, March 15, 1964, p. 1.